2005-Nov-03

Linux server's sshd would not start. Error in logs was:

sshd: fatal: daemon() failed: No such device

I read online that caused by invalid /dev/null. And I saw it was a zero byte regular file. I do not know what did that. I removed it and recreated with:

mknod /dev/null c 1 3

. Then sshd started up.

And scp worked to it. But couldn't login -- it just hung. I noticed xterm would also not run: no available ptys. The system had a kernel upgrade recently. The fix was to create a /dev/pts directory and then add mount point to fstab(5) and mount it:

none    /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620  0       0

(Probably should use correct gid -- as 5 doesn't exist on this system.)