My colleague, doing the HIPL development, principally uses ubuntu and although he is now building the Fedora/Centos rpms for me, he leaves much of the testing to me..... Anyway for any kernel prior to 2.6.27, I have to run the hip code in userspace, not kernel space. This is due to the ESP BEET patch. There is a specific hipd for userspace, but the hipfw requires a different option. For a while, everytime I would get a new rpm, I would have to modify /etc/init.d/hipfw to add this to OPTIONS. Then we added support for /etc/defaults/hipfw to have the OPTIONS. Worked just fine in ubuntu so he released it. And things stopped working for me in Centos. After some fiddling, I finally figured out that /etc/defaults/hipfw was NOT being processed for its one line: OPTIONS= This is exactly the same line that is in the /etc/init.d/hipfw, but with the added value. Does anyone have experience with /etc/defaults and perhaps shed light on what might not be working?