Many of the ones you list have other controls that are functionally equivalent; for example, a missing sysctl.conf effectively disables sysctl. (I am not defending the current paradigm, just trying to describe it; in fact, I rather dislike the way it pushes configuration information out into a bunch of little files instead of keeping it in rc.conf - the aspect of that that bothers me most, personally, is network interface configuration.) you can put a lot of network config (at least what i use) in rc.conf. eg, i either have dhclient=YES or ifconfig_<int>="..." and defaultroute=a.b.c.d. that works mostly for me. .mrg.