Bug#191309: This problem was evident when remastering Knoppix...

[Greg Matyola <matyola@gmail.com>]

I ran into the same problem with apt-get, and remounting the
filesystem without "nodev" seemed to fix both the /dev/null problem,
and the "FATAL -> Could not set non-blocking flag Bad file descriptor"
error.

This error seemed to float around to different parts, if I commented
out other http formats, and also went away, as described in the
original report, if I changed the "http" to "ftp"

This article is what led me to the same conclusion as Arthur.  Maybe
the part of Apt-get that implements the HTTP transport needs a better
check for a working (and not placeboized) /dev file system.

Here is a more current link to the Knoppix HowTO which helped me out:

http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Knoppix_Remastering_Howto
- Greg Matyola