After having set up X (not sure I really can call just installing it “setting up” though :-) ) and Gnome, which of course included installing and configuring Xmonad, I went on to configure some network-related stuff.

At home I use mDNS to make it easy to connect to the computers we have at home. I added avahi to the list of services to start in /etc/rc.conf and installed nss-mdns. Then I following the instructions on how to configure mDNS on Arch, which resulted in the following changes:

--- /etc/nsswitch.conf_old	2009-05-02 21:17:06.460591935 +0100
+++ /etc/nsswitch.conf	2009-04-25 18:08:39.719853968 +0100
@@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
 
 publickey: files
 
-hosts: files dns
+hosts: files mdns_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns
 networks: files
 
 protocols: db files

I also need SSH access to my desktop machine so I installed OpenSSH (openssh). No changes were needed to the configuration but following the instructions I made the following change to /etc/hosts.allow to allow connections at all:

--- /etc/hosts.allow_orig	2009-05-02 21:31:16.243401337 +0100
+++ /etc/hosts.allow	2009-04-28 17:55:57.553603986 +0100
@@ -2,5 +2,6 @@
 # /etc/hosts.allow
 #
 
+sshd: ALL
 
 # End of file

Then of course I added sshd to the list of services in /etc/rc.conf.

The last step was setting up NTP, based on suggestions on the Arch Wiki I installed OpenNTP (openntp) rather than the standard NTP package. No changes to the configuration were needed, just adding it to DAEMONS in /etc/rc.conf.

That was it, all the crucial network-related services set up and running at boot.