On 2009-01-24, Neil Bothwick <n...@digimed.co.uk> 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. [You must admit the argument is flawless -- though I still question the premise.] In order to get rid of my problems that weren't happening, I initially tried the "mount -bind" and "cp -a" commands that show up in /etc/issue when your /dev directory is hosed. That didn't help: after setting /etc/issue back to the default file and rebooting all the same problems still weren't happening (and /etc/issue was again modified to tell me to do mount -bind and cp -a to fix them). Then I tried booting with root in rw mode and init=/bin/bash and then doing a MAKEDEV generic-i386. (I found that recipe in an old mailing list somewhere.) MAKEDEV complained a lot about not being able to read /proc/devices. When I rebooted, I still had the all same problems not happening as before. I finally booted from a minimal install CD, mounted my root partition, removed its /dev directory completely and then re-created it by untaring ./dev from a good stage3 tarball. Now the system boots up smoothly. I feel like a bit of a fool expending so much effort getting rid of problems that weren't happening -- but, now the problems that weren't happening are gone, so I'm happy. ;) -- Grant
