In the introductory chapters of this book, the author observes that OpenBSD developers work under a single coordinator to develop and maintain an operating system intended to meet their own needs. There’s no attempt to make those outside the OpenBSD community feel welcome and requests for support aren’t encouraged.

In spite of that philosophy, OpenBSD has developed a reputation for reliability and security. Users only have to install what they need, and a minimal system such as a firewall can be accommodated on a 512MB drive.

I’ve been bitten a couple of times by the OpenBSD disk partitioning arrangement during multi-boot installations, and I found useful information in the detailed chapters on “Installation Preparations” and “Installation Walk-Through.” Chapters on post-installation setup and booting arrangements are followed by a section with detailed information on user management and root privileges.

If you want to use memory file systems, network file system (NFS) mounts, foreign file system types, redundant array of independent disks (RAID), or encrypted partitions, you can see some examples in the chapters on the file system. As a caution, the author asserts that he has some psychic powers that enable him to predict future events when somebody decides to encrypt his hard drive. Comments like this appear in every chapter, and they make what might otherwise be a rather bland treatise a lot more interesting.

The term “hacker” can have a number of different meanings, and the author suggests the alternatives “intruder” or “gravy-sucking pig-dog” to describe a person who breaks into computers. Some mechanisms to inhibit the activities of such people are discussed, including file flags, securelevel settings, and ProPolice compilations.

Most OpenBSD machines will be connected to a network, so there are some 40 pages introducing transmission control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP) and illustrating network setup commands. The examples for trunking will be of special interest to those whose servers require network redundancy.

As one might expect, the software management chapter explains how to install standard packages for applications such as web servers. It also illustrates how to use the ports collection to build and install applications from source code.

Subsequent chapters cover /etc files (lots of them, way more interesting than I expected), system maintenance procedures, and common daemons such as inetd, lpd, and dhcpd.

BSD systems traditionally use a monolithic kernel, so there are a couple of chapters on editing a binary kernel to activate disabled devices or adjust buffer sizes, and on building custom kernels to reduce memory requirements or for similar goals. The OpenBSD release upgrade process is also discussed. And for the dedicated nerd, there are instructions for building your own complete release from source!

The OpenBSD packet filter has developed a reputation for its wide range of capabilities, and a whole book has been written just on that topic. But you can get a good introduction to this feature by reading the two relevant chapters in this book.

Clearly, the author has provided more comprehensive coverage than might be found in many equivalent books about Linux operating systems. My only real complaint is the chapter on desktop OpenBSD, which goes into some detail about the twm terminal multiplexer and the cwm window manager, and doesn’t cover much else. I would have preferred seeing some information and perhaps a screen shot about how to add application items to the default fvwm window manager menu.

In any event, if you are running OpenBSD, then you are probably using it on server machines. If so, you won’t find a better treatment than this for learning about doing that.

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