[CentOS] Odd failure of smbd to start from init.d - CentOS 5.4

Fri May 21 15:54:26 UTC 2010
Ross Walker <rswwalker at gmail.com>

On May 21, 2010, at 10:44 AM, Whit Blauvelt <whit at transpect.com> wrote:

> 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.

Did you try debugging the init script with:

# sh -x <script> start

-Ross