If you have never used a Unix(-like) operating system before, your best friend is now the man command, which displays a manual page: the NetBSD manual pages are amongst the best and most detailed you can find, although they are very technical.

A good starting point after booting a new NetBSD system is the afterboot(8) manual page. It contains more detailed information about necessary and useful configuration settings.

man name shows the man page of the “name” command and man -k name shows a list of man pages dealing with “name” (you can also use the apropos command).

To learn the basics of the man command, type:

# man man

The manual is divided into nine sections, containing not only basic information on commands but also the descriptions of some NetBSD features and structures. For example, take a look at the hier(7) man page, which describes in detail the layout of the filesystem used by NetBSD.

# man hier

Other similar pages are release(7) and pkgsrc(7). Each section of the manual has an intro(8) man page describing its content. For example, try:

# man 8 intro

Manual pages are divided in several sections, depending on what they document:

A subject may appear in more than one section of the manual; to view a specific page, supply the section number as an argument to the man command. For example, time appears in section 1 (the time user command), in section 3 (the time function of the C library) and in section 9 (the time system variable). To see the man page for the time C function, write:

# man 3 time

To see all the available pages:

# man -w time
# man -a time

Besides the shell, a text editor is the most essential tool for the NetBSD system administration.

There are two obvious options in the base system

For the first login you will use the root superuser, which is the only user defined at the end of the installation. At the password prompt type the password for root that you have defined during the installation. If you haven't defined a password, just press Enter.

NetBSD/i386 (Amnesiac) (ttyE0)
login: root
password:
We recommend creating a non-root account and using su(1) for 
root access.
#

If you haven't defined a password for root during the installation, you should use the /usr/bin/passwd command to do so now.

# /usr/bin/passwd
Changing local password for root.
New password:
Retype new password:

Passwords are not displayed on the screen while you type. Later we will see how to add other accounts on the system.

Choose a password that has numbers, digits, and special characters (not space) as well as from the upper and lower case alphabet. Do not choose any word in any language. It is common for an intruder to use dictionary attacks.

It is time to add new users to the system, since you do not want to use the root account for your daily work. For security reasons, it is bad practice to login as root during regular use and maintenance of the system. Instead, administrators are encouraged to add a regular user, add the user to the wheel group, then use the su(1) command when root privileges are required. NetBSD offers the useradd(8) utility to create user accounts. For example, to create a new user:

# useradd -m joe

The defaults for the useradd command can be changed; see the useradd(8) man page.

User accounts that can su to root are required to be in the "wheel" group. This can be done when the account is created by specifying a secondary group:

# useradd -m -G wheel joe

As an alternative, the usermod(8) command can be used to add a user to an existing group:

# usermod -G wheel joe

In case you just created a user but forgot to set a password, you can still do that later using the passwd(1) command.

# passwd joe

Shadow passwords are enabled by default;: all the passwords in /etc/passwd contain an “*”; the encrypted passwords are stored in another file /etc/master.passwd, that can be read only by root. When you start vipw(8) to edit the password file, the program opens a copy of /etc/master.passwd; when you exit, vipw checks the validity of the copy, creates a new /etc/passwd and installs the new /etc/master.passwd file. Finally, vipw launches pwd_mkdb(8), which creates the files /etc/pwd.db and /etc/spwd.db, two databases which are equivalent to /etc/passwd and /etc/master.passwd but faster to process.

As you can see, passwords are handled automatically by NetBSD; if you use vipw to edit the password file you don't need any special administration procedure.

It is very important to always use vipw and the other tools for account administration (chfn(1), chsh(1), chpass(1), passwd(1)) and to never modify directly /etc/master.passwd or /etc/passwd.

The keyboard still has the US layout; if you have a different keyboard it's better to change its layout now, before starting to configure the system. For example, to use the italian keyboard, give the following command:

# wsconsctl -k -w encoding=it
encoding -> it

To save the keyboard layout permanently add the following line to the /etc/wscons.conf file:

encoding it

See Section 8.1.2.1, “Keyboard mappings” for a list of keymaps available as well as how to make these settings permanent.

NetBSD, like all Unix systems, uses a system clock based on Greenwich time (GMT) and this is what you should set your system clock to. If you want to keep the system clock set to the local time (because, for example, you have a dual boot system with Windows installed), you must notify NetBSD, adding rtclocaltime=YES to /etc/rc.conf:

# echo rtclocaltime=YES >> /etc/rc.conf
# sh /etc/rc.d/rtclocaltime restart

The value of the number of minutes west of GMT is calculated automatically and it's set under kern.rtc_offset sysctl variable.

To display the current setting of the kern.rtc_offset variable:

# sysctl kern.rtc_offset
kern.rtc_offset = -60

Now the kernel knows how to convert the time of the PC clock in the GMT system time but you must still configure the system for your local time zone (which you will find in the /usr/share/zoneinfo directory).

If needed, change the date and change the symbolic link of /etc/localtime to the appropriate time zone in the /usr/share/zoneinfo directory.

Examples:

# date 200705101820

Sets the current date to May 10th, 2007 6:20pm.

# ln -fs /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Helsinki /etc/localtime

Sets the time zone to Eastern Europe Summer Time.

By default, all services are disabled in a fresh NetBSD installation, and ssh(1) is no exception. You may wish to enable it so you can remotely control your system. Set sshd=yes in /etc/rc.conf and then starting the server with the command

# /etc/rc.d/sshd start

The first time the server is started, it will generate a new keypair, which will be stored inside the directory /etc/ssh.

NetBSD uses the /etc/rc.conf for system configuration at startup: this file determines what will be executed when the system boots. Understanding this file is important. The rc.conf(5) manual page contains a detailed description of all the options.

The /etc/defaults/rc.conf file contains the default values for a lot of settings, and to override a default value, the new value must be put into /etc/rc.conf: the definitions there override the one in /etc/defaults/rc.conf (which should stay unchanged).

# man rc.conf

The first modifications are:

Not all necessary network settings can be set in the /etc/rc.conf file. The system needs to know the names and the IP addresses of the computers (hosts) in the local network. These settings need to be added to the /etc/hosts file in the form:

IP-address  hostname  host

For example:

192.168.1.3 vigor3.your.domain vigor3

To resolve the names and IP addresses of remote hosts the system needs access to a (remote or local) DNS nameserver. That means to simply add the IP addresses of one or more nameservers to the /etc/resolv.conf file, using the following form:

nameserver 145.253.2.75

New users are often surprised by the fact that although the installation program recognized and mounted their CD-ROM perfectly, the installed system seems to have “forgotten” how to use the CD-ROM. There is no special magic for using a CD-ROM: you can mount it as any other file system, all you need to know is the device name and some options to the mount(8) command. You can find the device name with the aforementioned dmesg(8) command. For example, if dmesg displays:

# dmesg | grep ^cd
cd0 at atapibus0 drive 1: <ASUS CD-S400/A, , V2.1H> type 5 cdrom removable

the device name is cd0, and you can mount the CD-ROM with the following commands:

# mkdir /cdrom
# mount -t cd9660 -o ro /dev/cd0a /cdrom

To make things easier, you can add a line to the /etc/fstab file:

/dev/cd0a /cdrom cd9660 ro,noauto 0 0

Without the need to reboot, you can now mount the CD-ROM with:

# mount /cdrom

When the CD-ROM is mounted you can't eject it manually; you will have to unmount it before you can do that:

# umount /cdrom

There is also a software command which unmounts the CD-ROM and ejects it:

# eject /dev/cd0a

To mount a floppy you must know the name of the floppy device and the file system type of the floppy. Read the fdc(4) manpage for more information about device naming, as this will differ depending on the exact size and kind of your floppy disk. For example, to read and write a floppy in MS-DOS format you use the following command:

# mount -t msdos /dev/fd0a /mnt

Instead of /mnt, you can use another directory of your choice; you could, for example, create a /floppy directory like you did for the cdrom. If you do a lot of work with MS-DOS floppies, you will want to install the mtools package, which enables you to access a MS-DOS floppy (or hard disk partition) without the need to mount it. It is very handy for quickly copying a file from or to a floppy:

# mcopy foo bar a:
# mcopy a:baz.txt baz
# mcopy a:\*.jpg .

By the time that you have installed your system, it is quite likely that bugs in the release have been found. All significant and easily fixed problems will be reported at http://www.NetBSD.org/support/security/. It is recommended that you check this page regularly.

Use one of the following two shutdown commands to halt or reboot the system:

# shutdown -h now
# shutdown -r now

Two other commands to perform the same tasks are:

# halt
# reboot

halt, reboot and shutdown are not synonyms: the latter is more sophisticated. On a multiuser system you should really use shutdown this will allow you to schedule a shutdown time, notify users, and it will also take care to shutdown database processes etc. properly without simply kill(1)ing them. For a more detailed description, see the shutdown(8), halt(8) and reboot(8) manpages.