Hitchhiker's Guide to Openbsd

Starting Daemons and Services that come with OpenBSD
Most daemons and services that come with OpenBSD are controlled on boot by variables defined in the /
etc/rc.conf configuration file. Take a look at the 
/etc/rc.conf
file. You'll see lines similar to this: 
ftpd_flags=NO # for non-inetd use: ftpd_flags="-D"
A line like this shows that 
ftpd(8)
is not to start up with the system (at least not as a daemon via rc(8); ftpd 
is often run out of 
inetd(8)
, see 
Anonymous FTP FAQ
 to read more about this). Each line has a comment 
showing you the flags for common usage of that daemon or service. This doesn't mean that you must run 
that daemon or service with those flags. Read the relevant manual page to see how you can have that 
daemon or service start up in any way you like. 
We strongly suggest you do not alter /etc/rc.conf itself. Instead, create or edit the file /etc/rc.conf.local, 
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq10.html (3 of 32)9/4/2011 10:02:15 AM

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10 - System Management
copy just the lines you need to change from /etc/rc.conf and adjust them as you like. This makes future 
upgrades easier -- all the changes are in the one file that isn't touched during upgrade. In fact, the standard 
upgrade process
assumes you have not modified /etc/rc.conf, and will overwrite it with the new version. 
For example, here is the default line pertaining to httpd(8). 
httpd_flags=NO # for normal use: "" (or "-DSSL" 
after reading ssl(8))
Here you can see that starting up httpd normally requires no flags, so a line like 
httpd_flags=""
added to /etc/rc.conf.local will do the job. But to start httpd with ssl enabled (refer to the 
SSL FAQ
 or 
ssl
(8)
), you would start with a line like 
httpd_flags="-DSSL"
, though you may need to add other 
parameters for other reasons.