Upgrading OpenBSD in 5 easy steps

This assumes you only used the provided packages in the core system (anything you installed via pkg_add) almost all of these will be chrooted and secured for you, so there’s nothing for you to configure.

1) Backup
Your configuration stuff (/etc/* and so on) and things you may need to roll back. /home Would be untouched during the upgrade.

2) Housekeeping
From the FAQ of your version. There may be a couple of services to stop and files to move around. I only had to stop Kerberos :

/etc/rc.d/kadmind stop
/etc/rc.d/kpasswdd stop

And I stopped a few running services via /etc/rc.d/[service] stop just to be safe.

3) Download bsd.rd

Navigate to ‘/’ and then:

ftp ftp://[your mirror of choice]/pub/OpenBSD/[your version]/[your platform]/

E.G. I downloaded mine from http://openbsd.mirror.frontiernet.net/pub/OpenBSD/5.4/amd64/ to upgrade from 5.3 to 5.4. Note: You must only upgrade from one version to the next immediate version 5.2 -> 5.3, 5.3 -> 5.4 etc…

4) Reboot

5) Run pkg_add -u to upgrade installed packages.