openssh unix dev - Oct 2004 - daemon() failed

A friend of mine is having an issue running sshd as a daemon.  I don't 
have full access to this box, so troubleshooting may be difficult, but 
from what I can gather, the call to daemon() is failing.  sshd -D works 
fine, but sshd -e returns "daemon() failed: Success" , which is in and
of itself funny.  This is Slackware 10.0, with openssh 3.8.1p1 and glibc 
2.3.2.  I have several slack 10 boxes with this same combination that 
work fine, so he must have done something funny, but I can't figure out 
what.  I reinstalled both openssh and glibc to make sure they were all 
there, and ran ldconfig.  It didn't fix the problem.  I'm kind of 
stumped as to why the call to daemon() would fail.  Any ideas?

Thanks,
Joel

Joel Ebel wrote:
> A friend of mine is having an issue running sshd as a daemon.  I don't 
> have full access to this box, so troubleshooting may be difficult, but 
> from what I can gather, the call to daemon() is failing.  sshd -D works 
> fine, but sshd -e returns "daemon() failed: Success"
That probably means the daemon() call returned a failure error code but 
did not set errno.
> which is in and 
> of itself funny.  This is Slackware 10.0, with openssh 3.8.1p1 and glibc 
> 2.3.2.  I have several slack 10 boxes with this same combination that 
> work fine, so he must have done something funny, but I can't figure out
> what.  I reinstalled both openssh and glibc to make sure they were all 
> there, and ran ldconfig.  It didn't fix the problem.  I'm kind of 
> stumped as to why the call to daemon() would fail.  Any ideas?
Check config.h for HAVE_DAEMON, if it's set try commenting it out and 
rebuilding (make clean && make).   This will use OpenSSH's own 
replacement function.

-- 
Darren Tucker (dtucker at zip.com.au)
GPG key 8FF4FA69 / D9A3 86E9 7EEE AF4B B2D4  37C9 C982 80C7 8FF4 FA69
     Good judgement comes with experience. Unfortunately, the experience
usually comes from bad judgement.

We figured this one out.  Apparently, /dev/null had gotten corrupted. 
So if you run into this problem on Linux, check to make sure /dev/null 
is actually a character device and has permissions 666.

Joel

Joel Ebel wrote:
> A friend of mine is having an issue running sshd as a daemon.  I don't 
> have full access to this box, so troubleshooting may be difficult, but 
> from what I can gather, the call to daemon() is failing.  sshd -D works 
> fine, but sshd -e returns "daemon() failed: Success" , which is
in and
> of itself funny.  This is Slackware 10.0, with openssh 3.8.1p1 and glibc 
> 2.3.2.  I have several slack 10 boxes with this same combination that 
> work fine, so he must have done something funny, but I can't figure out
> what.  I reinstalled both openssh and glibc to make sure they were all 
> there, and ran ldconfig.  It didn't fix the problem.  I'm kind of 
> stumped as to why the call to daemon() would fail.  Any ideas?
> 
> Thanks,
> Joel
> 
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