Any suggestion regarding /DEV wipe out on freebsd 4.7?

[Nikos Vassiliadis]

On Thursday 31 August 2006 09:29, babak badaei wrote:
> Hello,
>
> A few days ago I was not able to log into my machine using SSH. I got this
> following message "Server refused to allocate pty". I was, somewhat
> fortunately, able to log using SCP. So SCP works. The file system looked
> good for the most part; until I checked out "/DEV". Almost everything was
> GONE! Including MAKEDEV. Not sure what to do.
>
> Possible clue: Before this happened, last time I was actually logged in via
> SSH, I ran a dropdb command on one of my postgres databases and got an
> error message saying I did not have permission to "/DEV/NULL". Not sure
> what to do, I set permissions to allow write on "NULL". I have done
> "dropdb" many times before and had never seen that message.
>
> If anyone has any clue as do how I may restore /DEV; or how this could have
> happened. I would appreciate your input. I am running freeBSD 4.7 with 2GB
> of memory on an Intel Xeon machine. Only thing left in /DEV is a file for
> each harddrive partition.
>
> Thanks!
>

According to a 4.10-something box I have, the only plain
files in /dev/ are MAKEDEV and MAKEDEV.local. So, get a
fresh copy from cvs and then create the devices you need(
man MAKEDEV if you don't know how to do this).

cvs -d anoncvs at anoncvs.freebsd.org:/home/ncvs checkout \
-r RELENG_4_7_0_RELEASE src/etc/MAKEDEV src/etc/MAKEDEV.local

HTH, nikos