I'm sure this *used* to work (way back when I had a 540). It works fine if I try it on a filesystem mounted from a Linux server...
Works fine under real operating systems:
: pancake:/home/n/nick> mknod foo p : pancake:/home/n/nick> ls -al foo : prw-r--r-- 1 nick 128 0 Feb 8 17:59 foo| : pancake:/home/n/nick> uname : FreeBSD
Are you mounting the filesystem with "nodev"?
Nick
[P.S. no flames, please. This is a private joke.]