Believe it or not, OpenBSD isn’t perfect. Releases sometimes have bugs. Some of these are serious problems; others not so much.

When the OpenBSD team learns of a serious problem with a release, it issues an errata list, and whenever you build a new server, you should check the errata list at http://www.OpenBSD.org/errata.html. Critical errata are also announced on [email protected], so if you’re on that mailing list, you’ll get notifications of new errata. You’ll also see errata notices on http://www.undeadly.org/.

Errata won’t always affect your use case. For example, as I write this, OpenBSD 5.0 has one errata notice: a problem in the BIND name server. If this server won’t run BIND, don’t worry about this errata. If you’re building a name server, however, you need this information before going into production.

If you’re in doubt, correct your system as recommended in the errata, which may require building one or more parts of OpenBSD from source. (I’ll discuss errata and building OpenBSD at length in Chapter 20.)

You needed to choose a root password during installation. To change it, use the passwd(1) command. Of course, you must be root to change root’s password.