On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 10:04:36AM -0400, Ross Walker wrote: > By any chance did someone add smbd to xinetd? > > If so then xinetd has the port open and the smbd process will not bind. Nope. Not sure that would explain why a slight difference in how it's invoked, through the same init.d script, makes the difference in whether it runs. That is: sh /etc/init.d/smb start (and "/usr/sbin/smbd -D") which always works from console, differs from /etc/init.d/smb start (and "service smb start" too) which doesn't ever work on this box, how? This is when smb starts with "#!/bin/sh" anyway. Only thing I can figure is that there may be a subtle difference in timing, a slowing down just enough to make the startup tolerant of hardware that's right on the margin. There's no significant difference (if any) in envars. After questioning everything else - including close comparison to some Redhat 5.4 systems with smbd starting fine - by elimination the hardware seems the only thing left to question. But I'm still open to ideas. Thanks, Whit