Racker Hacker

If you find that /dev/null is no longer a block device, and it causes issues during init on Red Hat boxes, you will need to follow these steps to return things to normal:

• Reboot the server
• When grub appears, edit your kernel line to include init=/bin/bash at the end
• Allow the server to boot into the emergency shell
• Run the following three commands

# rm -rf /dev/null
# mknod /dev/null c 1 3
# chmod 666 /dev/null

You should be back to normal. Make sure that the root users on your server don't use cp or mv with /dev/null as this will cause some pretty ugly issues.