On Tue, 27 Mar 2007, Joachim Schipper wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 27, 2007 at 08:23:17PM +0200, Tasmanian Devil wrote:
> > Hello, list! :-)
> >
> > After reading this list for several monthes with dedication and after
> > learning a lot from all of you, I've a strange problem myself now:
> >
> > I'm following -current on an Apple Mac mini (GENERIC.MP with ACPI
> > enabled, dmesg below) and I transfer files with SCP and SFTP to this
> > server. After a few successful transfers, /dev/null obviously breaks
> > somehow on the server ("Couldn't open /dev/null" error on the client
> > side):
> >
> > /dev root# ls -l null
> > -rw------- 1 root wheel 56 Mar 27 18:13 null
> >
> > After a "./MAKEDEV std" everything works fine again, at least for the
> > next few file transfers:
> >
> > /dev root# ls -l null
> > crw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 2, 2 Mar 27 19:50 null
> >
> > At first I thought the upgrade to OpenSSH 4.6 with a snapshot from
> > about two weeks ago would have fixed this problem, but it just
> > happened again. I've searched on the web and in the mailing list
> > archive, but couldn't find anything related to this problem so far. I
> > have never seen this problem on any of my other OpenBSD machines.
> >
> > Has anybody an idea what I could do to find the cause of this
> > "disappearing /dev/null"? Thank you in advance for your help!
>
> Well, it doesn't disappear so much as having its permissions altered,
> but I'm certain you are aware of that.
The device also turned into a regular file. Maybe the content of the
null file gives a hint of what went wrong. Which files were you
copying and to which directory? scp -v might help to see what is going on.
> Are you sure it's OpenSSH? What other daemons are using to /dev/null
> (fstat?)? It would make sense if some daemon thought it was a logfile or
> somesuch and decided to 'secure' it...
-Otto
