Varnish Startup Issue

Ran into an issue where attempting to start Varnish on a VMWare VM spewed the following:

Assert error in main(), varnishd.c line 632: Condition((daemon(1, d_flag)) == 0) not true. errno = 19 (No such device

The reason was that /dev/null was a bit… wonky. To fix this, I did:

rm /dev/null
mknod -m 666 /dev/null c 1 3

Really confused as to how /dev/null could go wonky – that is, break – that is, look like a normal freaking file, but eh, there you have it.