Vanishing files in /dev

[hamatoma]

I notice that at times some files in /dev vanish:
A list of some:
isdncntrl0 video0 mixer1 mixer video hda hdc ...
I have learned to restore them by linking or creating them with mknod.
But I want to know: What is the reason of vanishing? Previous I used SuSe and this never happens.
Any ideas to prevent?

[chart]

Hi,

All I can say is you 're not losing your mind, I thought I was losing mine when after a few reboots my X stopped working with a message about "virtual console 7" not being available. Although I thought there are only 6 virtual consoles in "normal" Linux and I had no idea X needed a virtual console, I tried

MAKEDEV /dev/tty7

and my X was back! Losing other /dev entries sounds very, very dangerous of course, and I hope someone has an idea, maybe we can install a monitoring program that records the time, date and process that something is deleted?

[duckbird]

Hate to chime in, but I had the exact same problem on two machines. I lost /dev/null and /dev/hda, which caused some annoying problems on boot up.