2007-12-13

Computing Oddities

Two strange and weird things happened to me recently. One is my /dev/null disappearing from leopard!




A large number of programs, both Cocoa and *nix relies on /dev/null being present. As you can see I could not gain root privileges, and thus could not recreate /dev/null (character device, 3,2). I had to in the end reboot and /dev/null was recreated.

Second strange thing is when I created a self-signed certificate for use with apache2 (for anonshare). I created it with openssl specifying 36500 for -days. The result is an certificate with expiration date in the past!





I am not aware of any X.509 specification regarding the number of days a certificate can be valid for, so I wonder - is this a bug in openssl?





Cheers,

Steve