HYPERAXE

For some reasons, one of my VPS server stopped responding to SSH requests after a reboot. I was really clueless as to what happened since the last thing I did was execute RootKit Hunter to initiate a server security check. It’s good that I was still able to execute commands on my VPS via HyperVM’s “Command Center” module. It was then I saw the error from the logs that states – fatal: daemon() failed: No such device.

After some tinkering around, I found out that the problem is due to /dev/null being overwritten as a regular file. This was a bit weird since I doubt RootKit Hunter has something to do with it. Anyway, it’s not right to investigate the cause at this point but rather make SSH start properly to accept incoming requests.

So to fix things, it was a simple 3 command fix:

rm -rf /dev/null
mknod /dev/null c 1 3
/etc/rc.d/init.d/sshd restart

So that was it. The SSH daemon started successfully and I was able to SSH login to my server. Next thing to do now is investigate as to why /dev/null got overwritten in the first place so as to prevent this problem from happening again.

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