On Fri, Nov 18, 2016 at 05:56:20AM +1000, Stuart Longland wrote: > On 18/11/16 05:51, Peter N. M. Hansteen wrote: > > This is probably a one-off (actually two, but more about that later) that > will only ever bite me and never be heard of againg, but I have to ask: > > > > What could cause your /dev/, which is normally in the kilobytes in size, to > swell to *gigabyte* range? > > Very stupid question, but your /dev/null wouldn't have been replaced by > a plain file would it? > > (Yes, I had that happen to me by accident once.)
Not stupid at all to my mind, but [Thu Nov 17 20:58:34] peter@skapet:~$ ls -l /dev/null crw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 2, 2 Nov 17 20:58 /dev/null so that does not seem to be the problem. however [Thu Nov 17 21:00:39] peter@skapet:~$ doas ls -lS /dev/ | head total 2301984 -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 1178386432 Oct 27 2015 sd0 -r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 11584 Nov 17 07:36 MAKEDEV dr-xr-xr-x 2 root wheel 1024 Nov 17 18:01 fd lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 9 Aug 1 2014 audioctl -> audioctl0 lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 6 Aug 1 2014 audio -> audio0 lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 6 Aug 1 2014 mixer -> mixer0 lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 6 Aug 1 2014 radio -> radio0 lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 6 Aug 1 2014 sound -> sound0 lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 6 Aug 1 2014 video -> video0 [Thu Nov 17 21:00:49] peter@skapet:~$ and [Thu Nov 17 21:01:34] peter@skapet:~$ file /dev/sd0 /dev/sd0: ISO 9660 CD-ROM filesystem data 'Ubuntu 15.10 amd64 ' (bootable) x86 boot sector; partition 2: ID=0xef, starthead 254, startsector 2279532, 4544 sectors so a device had indeed been replaced by a regular file. Simple PEBKAC caused this then. -- Peter N. M. Hansteen, member of the first RFC 1149 implementation team http://bsdly.blogspot.com/ http://www.bsdly.net/ http://www.nuug.no/ "Remember to set the evil bit on all malicious network traffic" delilah spamd[29949]: 85.152.224.147: disconnected after 42673 seconds.
