creating devices under a regular file system

[Will Parsons]

On Thursday, 15 Oct 2015  2:31 PM -0400, Eduardo Morras wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Oct 2015 23:29:50 +0000 (UTC)
> Will Parsons <varro at nodomain.invalid> wrote:
>
>> I would like to know how to create a few selected devices
>> (viz. dev/null and dev/urandom) under a regular directory tree using
>> devfs.
>> 
>> The background for this is the following:
>> 
>> I use the fossil SCM system for various projects of mine, and keep the
>> repositories under ~/FOSSIL.  Fossil provides a web interface, which I
>> employ using inetd, using the following line in /etc/inetd.conf:
>> 
>> http stream tcp nowait root /usr/local/bin/fossil fossil
>> http /home/<uname>/FOSSIL
>> 
>> This works, but I get a warning message "can't open /dev/null and
>> /dev/urandom", because fossil does a chroot into ~/FOSSIL, where of
>> course the referenced devices do not exist.  I asked about this on the
>> fossil mailing list and got the reply that the preferred method of
>> avoiding the warning message was to create these devices in the
>> chrooted environment.
>> 
>> I presume that this can be done somehow via devfs, but am failing to
>> discern how.
>
> I use fossil since its inception and never seen that warning. Is your user on wheel group?

Yes.  The warnings have been there since February, I think.  I'm
running version 1.33.   When I go into Administration, I see:

WARNING: Device "/dev/null" is not available for reading and writing.

WARNING: Device "/dev/urandom" is not available for reading. This
means that the pseudo-random number generator used by SQLite will be
poorly seeded.