Apache2 chroot /dev/null permission denied

[Knowledge Seeker <knoseeker@googlemail.com>]

Hi,
I have an old Debian Etch box, running Apache2 on chroot jail. Yesterday, (it sounds like joke) I turned off the machine and when I started it again the web server did not come to life again.
The problem was a Permission Denied on the /dev/null.

I created my device with the command:  mknod -m 0666 /chroot/dev/null c 1 3
listing the permissions:

crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 3 2010-03-16 18:37 null
crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 8 2010-03-16 18:39 random
crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 9 2010-03-16 18:39 urandom


(When I change the group to sys, don't solve the problem)

Even outside of the chroot when I try to echo something and redirect to this device I get the same message:

-su: null: Permission Denied

My kernel is the default: 
2.6.18-6-686 #1 SMP 

Everything worked fine 2 days ago.

I really wish to understand and solve this issue. 
When I mount all /dev with a bind option, it works fine again, but I wouldn't want to have all my devices available inside chroot.

I really appreciate any help.

Thanks in advance

-- 
Knoseeker