Amazon (or perhaps Amazon's configuration of Xen) forces a machine to come up at run level 4, regardless of what's in /etc/inittab. I've looked through /etc/rc.sysinit and /etc/rc.d/rc, to determine which (if any script) looks at /proc/cmdline and forces a particular run level, but to no avail. It seems that /sbin/init does the forcing. Can anyone confirm that /sbin/init reads /proc/cmdline to overwrite /etc/inittab? I can't seem to find any reference in man pages or searching the web. Thanks, Kurt