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Ubuntu Broken Upgrade, Lost GUI, /dev/null: Permission denied

I am toying with Karmic's alpha releases. So, in comes a new partial upgrade rolled out and I chose to get it. At the end of the upgrade, I had a rare - stuck linux - situation. So I hard rebooted; Only to find that the system now restarts to a GDM that is broken. It gets to a blank screen with a *loading* mouse icon. I was contemplating a complete redo(download the daily build for karmic and install it).

However, I thought its worth troubleshooting. So on that blank GDM screen, I pressed Ctrl+Alt+F2 to open a tty. When I logged in, I got a lot of 
/dev/null: Permission denied
Apparently, My upgrade dint finish well. First thing that came to my mind is to reconfigure the whole setup.
sudo dpkg --configure -a
But I was getting the same errors /dev/null: Permission denied.

Pretty much everything I did got me to the same error. I rebooted to my Jaunty install. A quick search showed me how I could install this all important /dev/null.

All you have to do was to remove and recreate it.
sudo rm /dev/null
sudo mknod -m 0666 /dev/null c 1 3

That should save me 2hrs :). So much for "null".
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