What can I put in /etc/rc.conf ?

[humphrayLegare]

I wanted to share that for new comers.

Have you ever wonder what are all the options I could put in /etc/rc.conf ? I have been wondering about that question yesterday. Found out one has to read :

https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?rc.conf(5)

And as well you could check :

/etc/defaults/rc.conf

and read about all of their default.

 

[ralphbsz]

Thank you for pointing that out. But there is also the converse to consider: There are lots of things that one should NOT put in rc.conf. For example, you might have a program that needs to be run once during booting, in my case to initialize an unusual piece of hardware. Do not put a call to that program in rc.conf, because rc.conf will be executed many times over, often at inappropriate times! This is a mistake I've seen other people do multiple times too. There are many places initialization programs can be put in various placed; I decided to put it in the start function of a related service in /etc/rc.d/... (because it does special hardware initialization for stuff needed for a service, in my case an old parallel printer connected to an unusual motherboard with a non-standard parallel port).

 

[drhowarddrfine]

Or just plain man rc.conf on your FreeBSD system. No need to go to the web for the man file.