Well, it was not working anyway.
After a reboot, the same problem was still here.
On syslog I can see:
Nov 1 17:36:19 et9x00 authpriv.warn dropbear[518]: Failed reading '/etc/dropbear/dropbear_dss_host_key', disabling DSS
Nov 1 17:36:19 et9x00 authpriv.info dropbear[519]: premature exit: Failed to daemonize: No such device
The first line is expected (we are using rsa and not DSS), but the second line points to the error that prevents dropbear from running. A device i missing and it is "/dev/null"!
Or better, /dev/null is still there but it is replaced by a regular file instead of a device:
root@et9x00:~# ls -al /dev/null
-rw-rw-rw- 1 root root 0 Jan 1 1970 /dev/null
root@et9x00:~# echo test > /dev/null
root@et9x00:~# cat /dev/null
test
To fix the problem just remove the file and replace it with a new device:
root@et9x00:~# rm /dev/null
root@et9x00:~# mknod /dev/null c 1 3
and now everything is fine again:
root@et9x00:~# ls -al /dev/null
crw-r--r-- 1 root root 1, 3 Nov 1 17:44 /dev/null
root@et9x00:~# echo test > /dev/null
root@et9x00:~# cat /dev/null
and in fact dropbear and ssh work again!
Probably the update of busybox replaced erroneously /dev/null with a normal file
Edited by Gennar1, 1 November 2011 - 17:50.