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