devices missing?

[Steffen Grunewald]

Hi,

did a fresh installation (with unchanged configuration, just to update
the set of packages on the machine), and ended up with an unbootable
system. (The last successful attempt dates back to 20041221; I'm using
sarge.)

Looking through the log files, and trying to re-do the failed kernel
installation step, I found that the message

/usr/sbin/mkinitrd: device /dev/hda1 is not a block device

has been caused by an almost empty /dev/ directory below /tmp/target:

xxx:/dev# ls
MAKEDEV  fd       loop   net   nvram  pts   shm      stderr  stdout
core     initctl  mouse  null  ppp    scsi  sndstat  stdin   xconsole

Obviously, there have been some changes somewhere. makedev (now 2.3.1-75)
has a timestamp dating back to August, so it's not to be blamed in the
first place... Any ideas? (Of course I can run MAKEDEV with the
appropriate options, but this should have been done by some basic
installation step before.)

I also get a lot of error messages from SSL related packages (apache,
ssh...) complaining about the PRNG. This might be bugs or features,
something I have to find out...

Cheers,
 Steffen
-- 
Steffen Grunewald * * * Merlin cluster admin (http://pandora.aei.mpg.de)
Albert-Einstein-Institut (MPI Gravitationsphysik, http://www.aei.mpg.de)
       Science Park Golm, Am Mühlenberg 1, 14476 Potsdam, Germany
e-mail: steffen.grunewald(*)aei.mpg.de * +49-331-567-{fon:7233,fax:7298}