NixOS/nixos — pull request #28 by mornfall (2012-08-18 13:18:48+00:00)
Title: Fix upgrades for machines with non-writeable /dev/console

On my cluster, /dev/console points to DRAC's Serial-over-LAN. However, some of the machines had SoL disabled in BIOS, which meant /dev/console was not writeable. Either way, relying on /dev/console is wrong (see also http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=546743). With existing setup, since all upstart scripts run with set -e, if /dev/console gives EIO, things start to fail and make profile activation impossible:
initctl: Event failed

This thing at least fixes the problem with things dying. The useless diagnostics are a separate (and probably upstream) issue...