From: Sean Conner Date: 21:40 on 26 Jun 2007 Subject: Installing Firefox should not wipe out /dev Ah, where to place the blame? That is the question ... The situation: I work in a small webhosting company, and in order to cut costs (and boost employee morale) we now all work from home. Or rather, we no longer have to work at The Office. Which is a Good Thing (TM). We have a large physical server (running Linux) upon which we installed OpenVZ, and my "workstation" is a virtual server (also running Linux) running on this monster box. My "workstation" is really only used to check email (I receive root's mail on this box from all the various servers) and to log into certain devices that have restricted access. I can do everything (short of anything requiring physical access to the servers, which is rare) from anywhere I have Internet connectivity. So far, so good. Except for accessing our spam firewall [1]. It's one of the restricted devices, and double plus ungood, the only interface is via the web [2]. Which wouldn't be so bad, except that when I set up my "virtual workstation" I did not install X Windows. At the time, I forsaw no need to install about a bazillion megabytes of crap. If I'm working remotely, I already have all the GUI crap I need in front of me. But recent events at The "Office" [3] require I check the spam firewall on a regular basis. Now, if I'm at home, this I can do. Since I have DSL with a static IP address [5], I can access the spam firewall. If I'm elsewhere (which I am half the time), then I can't. So, today, I decide to install Firefox on my "virtual workstation". That way, I can "ssh -X workstation" and run Firefox there, which has the access I require to access the spam firewall. Silly me, I thought it would be a simple: GenericRootPrompt# yum install firefox Surprisingly, specifying "firefox" to "yum install" actually did what I expected it to---install firefox---instead of bitching about not finding it because it *really* wanted "yum install firefox-pointless-version-numbers-and-architecture-information". But what I did not expect was the process *DELETING* the contents of /dev. Yup. Gone. The whole thing. No /dev. Oh, I didn't find out immediately. No. I first had to try GenericUnixPrompt> ssh -X workstation only to get the bizarre "couldn't exchange keys" or something error---the one that happens when sshd crashes on a connection. Okay, I'm still logged into my "workstation" as root---so just a simple: GenericRootPrompt# /etc/init.d/sshd restart but it failed, saying to couldn't generate some key or other. *THAT'S* when I found out /dev was empty. At least being a virtual server meant that I could do some stupid things to get it working (instead of doing stupid things and locking myself out of the "workstation" were a trip to the Data Center and a recovery disk were required). So ... Who gets the blame here? OpenVZ? Yum? The firefox yum installation script? -spc (oh, and apparently firefox no longer supports the "-no-remote" option [6] ... sigh) [1] An "appliance" from some company. I have no complaint with this device. It does what it does, and doesn't give us much trouble. Our customers, however, do, because they either receive too much spam, or "important" email is filtered as spam, and they keep asking to be added, then removed, from said spam firewall. But that's not a software hate, so I shall speak on this topic no further. [2] Okay, maybe I have one complaint about the spam firewall [1]. [3] Lost messages between three mail servers, one of which is the spam firewall, one of which is another email server we control, and one which is an email server controlled [4] by our customer, which I now have to debug. Joy. [4] They're a Windows shop, but have a token Linux box doing their email. Fun times. [5] DSLi. Static IP address at no extra charge. I love these guys. [6] http://spc.hates-software.com/2007/01/25/73ba6651.html
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