Hi otto, We're happy to see you have found OpenBSD and that you are exploring the system.
Welcome! But please keep in mind that your assumptions about what is intuitive or proper were formed by whatever other systems you have encountered earlier (I suspect GNU/Linux). When you are exploring a different system, it is better to explore and look into the sources of information that are available. In contrast to eg Linux systems, OpenBSD is in fact generally quite well documented. And it has a fairly long history. On Mon, Mar 24, 2025 at 02:40:47PM +0000, otto.cooper wrote: > # Q1 > > Suppose you want to change the host name. I'll be snipping most of this. The /etc/myname and /etc/mygate have been in OpenBSD for as far back as I can remember tinkering with the system, and it would not surprise me a whole lot if the naming was decided back in the CSRG days or possibly even earlier. > To understand where the host name is written in OpenBSD, you need to read > hostname(1). Yes, reading man pages on OpenBSD is generally recommended. The FAQ at https://www.openbsd.org/faq/index.html is recommended too, and you may find that document (really a collection of documents) a little less demanding read. But anyway: once you find out what the local convention is, it is easy to remember and most definitely is easier to just go along with, rather than demanding that every existing OpenBSD system be changed to suit your preference. > # Q2 > > Let now consider /etc/hostname.if, where "if" stands for "interface" and has > nothing to do with the conditional statement. I was about to write a longish explanation, but no. Please just read the FAQ https://www.openbsd.org/faq/index.html, and reading the relevant man page (https://man.openbsd.org/hostname.if) can't hurt either. Once again, changing from an easily learned and long established convention to a different one is just not a reasonable suggestion here. Now if you want some further light reading that might have a small chance of proving enlightening, you could do worse than turn to my stuff, such as this piece - https://nxdomain.no/~peter/what_every_it_person_needs_to_know_about_openbsd.html (also published elsewhere, links therein) -- Peter N. M. Hansteen, member of the first RFC 1149 implementation team https://bsdly.blogspot.com/ https://www.bsdly.net/ https://www.nuug.no/ "Remember to set the evil bit on all malicious network traffic" delilah spamd[29949]: 85.152.224.147: disconnected after 42673 seconds.
