How does it fail?
Try for example (manually):
mkfifo foo
mknod foo c 1 1
# cd /
# mknod foo c 1 1
ksh: mknod: foo: Invalid argument
FAILS with invalid argument.
What *can* be an issue is that mknod inside a chroot is not allowed, as
well as mknod as non-root (except for pipes, i.e. mknod <path> p, which
is the same as mkfifo <path>).
agreed,
but I don't think I have / as a chroot,
and I am doing it as root, not su
I fear I some how messed up the userland or some kind of auditing
when I accidently a month ago used the MAKEDEV for a i386, then had to
boot off cdrom to redo /dev
