From owner-freebsd-questions Sun Jan 2 10: 3:41 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from hda.hda.com (hda.bicnet.net [208.220.68.243]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 45DBE14E8B; Sun, 2 Jan 2000 10:03:37 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from dufault@hda.hda.com) Received: (from dufault@localhost) by hda.hda.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) id MAA12865; Sun, 2 Jan 2000 12:00:41 -0500 (EST) From: Peter Dufault Message-Id: <200001021700.MAA12865@hda.hda.com> Subject: "bad namelist": no /dev/null? To: questions@freebsd.org Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 12:00:41 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL43 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG A missing /dev/null will give a mysterious "bad namelist" error. I've seen a few questions about this but no answers. I managed to screw myself up today by wiping out /dev/null (trying to build "ps.exe" for win32 and run it under wine, stupidly as root). It took me a while to figure out what had happened. The rc script dumps stuff into /dev/null and also copies /dev/null to initialize things - the result is pretty weird. Those of you who were doing "who" and seeing the output of "umount" now know what happened - umount onto dev null was then being copied to initialize utmp. Peter -- Peter Dufault (dufault@hda.com) Realtime development, Machine control, HD Associates, Inc. Safety critical systems, Agency approval To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message