From owner-freebsd-questions Sun Jul 16 21:46:19 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from gull.prod.itd.earthlink.net (gull.prod.itd.earthlink.net [207.217.121.85]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6DF1137B536 for ; Sun, 16 Jul 2000 21:46:17 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from bl29x5@earthlink.net) Received: from localhost (dialup-63.208.83.179.Stamford1.Level3.net [63.208.83.179]) by gull.prod.itd.earthlink.net (8.9.3-EL_1_3/8.9.3) with SMTP id VAA23931 for ; Sun, 16 Jul 2000 21:46:15 -0700 (PDT) From: Jooka Hyno To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: bad namelist Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2000 00:32:53 -0400 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.0.28] Content-Type: text/plain MIME-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: <00071700380700.01168@localhost> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG After searching for the solution to this problem, I came upon a post which reminded me that I had used /dev/null earlier as part of a redirection of output. In January Peter Dufault talked about /dev/null being the possible cause of a bad namelist error for various programs (ps, w, umount, et al). This does indeed seem to be the problem. I attempted to fix it by issuing the following commands as super-user: cd /dev cp null null.old mknod null c 2 2 chmod 666 null w (to test it out) It solved the problem. If something like this has been posted already, I apologize, and only wish I had seen it in the mailing list search before attempting to mess with devices myself. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message