There was no error shown at service startup, but the service status showed it was down
/etc/init.d/sshd start
Starting sshd: [ OK ]
/etc/init.d/sshd status
openssh-daemon is stopped
I checked the /var/log/secure logs to see what error is being thrown and it showed below error :
Feb 8 13:54:54 vps sshd[18431]: fatal: daemon() failed: No such device
The error was related to /dev/null which is suppossed to be a proper character device and not a regular file.
In this case it was a regular file so I removed it and recreated the character device as below :
rm -f /dev/null
mknod /dev/null c 1 3
Once the character device is created the permissions should look like below :
ls -lh /dev/null
crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 3 Jan 12 16:07 /dev/null
However, another error showed up when we tried to create /dev/null again
mknod /dev/null c 1 3
mknod: `/dev/null’: File exists
The solution for this was to create another /dev/null1 and renamed it to /dev/null
mknod /dev/null1 c 1 3
ll /dev/null1
crw-r–r– 1 root root 1, 3 Jun 9 00:47 /dev/null1
mv /dev/null1 /dev/null
After this was confirmed that /dev/null is a proper character device , I restarted the service and it came up fine this time :
/etc/init.d/sshd start
Starting sshd: [ OK ]
/etc/init.d/sshd status
openssh-daemon (pid 27662) is running...
