On 2009-01-25, Grant Edwards <[email protected]> wrote: > On 2009-01-24, Neil Bothwick <[email protected]> wrote: >> On Fri, 23 Jan 2009 05:55:10 +0100, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: >> >>> I have a server running that hets that null/console missing >>> message every boot - and it does not hurt it at any way. >> >> A missing /dev/console stops the boot process here. It boots >> without /dev/null, but only after udev spews out a load of >> messages. > > Ah, not to worry: I've been assured in the gentoo forum thread > that the problems we see when the root filesystem doesn't have > proper /dev/null and /dev/console nodes aren't really > happening: > > Neither /dev/null nor /dev/console are needed at boot-time, > therefore their absence doesn't cause problems.
For posterity's sake, one of the problems that wasn't happening was that my root partition always had to be recovered at startup -- it apparently wasn't getting properly unmounted during shutdown. After re-creating the root partition's /dev tree, that was cured. This leads one to suspect that the block device node for the root partition (/dev/hda3 in my case) is also required along with /dev/null and /dev/console for proper start-up and shut-down. -- Grant
