I’ve been using 4.9 for a week now and really love the improvements. The upgrade was dead simple and trouble free. Unfortunately, as I was upgrading my motherboard decided to die on me. Thankfully the helpful people at Westhost were able to get me back up and running in no time after a chassis swap.

The man pages for rc.conf(8) and rc.d(8) were extremely helpful for updating my configuration to take advantage of the new rc scripts. The only gotcha I ran into was that not everything has an rc script written for it yet and I had forgotten to setup certain ones to use a particular user like I had in my previous rc.local. Not a problem. The option to set a user for the startup daemon will always be named the same as the rc script. For example, the rc script for ClamAV is /etc/rc.d/clamd. To tell my server what user to run as I just add these lines to 1) start the daemon and 2) start it as the proper user in /etc/rc.conf.local.

rc_scripts=”clamd”
clamd_user=”_clamav”

Simple enough, huh?

OpenBSD admits that the rc script functionality is a work in progress. It works very well in its current form and is well implemented as it is in the other BSDs. This is a great release and you should upgrade if you haven’t already. A round of applause for the OpenBSD developers!