After you have installed and started your NetBSD VPS, go to the console and log-in as user root with the default password, "root".
One of the first things you
will want to do is change the default root password by typing
passwd at the prompt. Don't forget this password as there is
currently no way to recover it.
It is also a good habit to create a regular user account for
working, using su to obtain root privileges as needed.
To create a regular user account which is part of the administrative
wheel group:
useradd -m -G wheel <username>
Then immediately set its password with:
passwd <username>
This user will be in the wheel group and will be able
to perform administrative tasks by runing su to obtain
superuser privileges using the root password.
It is customary on UNIX systems for the system clock to be set
to UTC. To set the local time zone, find your zone file in
/usr/share/zoneinfo/ and link to it at
/etc/localtime as follows:
ln -fs /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Helsinki /etc/localtime
Look at the first line of your control panel at vps.sdf.org and note YOUR_HOSTNAME (e.g. netbsd99), EXTERNAL_IP (e.g. 205.166.94.nnn), and INTERNAL_IP (e.g. 10.1.0.nnn):
VPS Maintenance Shell for netbsd99 (205.166.94.nnn / 10.1.0.nnn)
-------- ------------- ----------
^ ^ ^
| | |
| EXTERNAL_IP INTERNAL_IP
|
YOUR_HOSTNAME
Open /etc/rc.conf in an editor and, replacing the text YOUR_HOSTNAME, EXTERNAL_IP, and INTERNAL_IP with your own actual host name and IP numbers, add:
hostname=YOUR_HOSTNAME.sdf.org defaultroute=205.166.94.1 auto_ifconfig=yes ifconfig_xennet0="inet EXTERNAL_IP netmask 0xffffff00" ifconfig_xennet1="inet INTERNAL_IP netmask 0xffffff00"
Then put this in /etc/resolv.conf:
nameserver 205.166.94.20
Add this to /etc/hosts:
EXTERNAL_IP YOUR_HOSTNAME.sdf.org YOUR_HOSTNAME
Run/Type:
/etc/rc.d/network restart
On NetBSD you can mount a pre-built (and still in progress) pkgsrc DESTDIR. Following the procedures below will effectively install the 2000+ included packages on your virtual NetBSD system.
Note that at the moment the pre-built pkgsrc assumes that its path is /pkgshare. Some programs won't work under a different prefix since they won't be able to find their shared libraries.
mkdir -p /pkgshare rmdir /usr/pkg ln -s /pkgshare /usr/pkg rm -rf /var/db/pkg ln -s /pkgshare/db/pkg /var/db/pkg mount -t nfs 10.1.0.1:/pkgshare /pkgshare export PATH=$PATH:/usr/pkg/bin:/usr/pkg/sbin
It is read only.
To set this up on boot, execute the steps above and then:
echo "nfs_client=YES" >> /etc/rc.conf echo "rpcbind=YES" >> /etc/rc.conf echo "10.1.0.1 vps" >> /etc/hosts echo "vps:/pkgshare /pkgshare nfs ro" >> /etc/fstab echo "export PATH=$PATH:/usr/pkg/bin:/usr/pkg/sbin" >> /etc/profile
Note that you cannot use both this pre-built pkgsrc and pre-built packages from netbsd.org. It may be possible to set the system up so you can, however this is best left to the experienced NetBSD administrator.
The default image comes with all distribution sets installed. You can free up some disk space by removing the ones you don't need.
First, check which distribution sets are installed:
ls /etc/mtree
Decide which sets you want to remove and examine their contents. For example, to remove games and all X11 sets:
for set in games xbase xcomp xetc xfont xserver ; do \ tar tJf /usr/INSTALL/$set.tar.xz | sed -e 's/^\.//' >> /tmp/purgelist ; \ done
After examining /tmp/purgelist and removing any files you want to
keep, do:
cat /tmp/purgelist | xargs rm