Just a follow up note: We've got the same problem again on another fresh install. Totally different hardware - so the hardware hypothesis bites the dust. Since other people aren't seeing this, the remaining suspect is our configuration files. We're using an smbpasswd backed, and in both these cases moved configuration files over from working Redhat systems for this. How that can explain the strange breakage (see the long discussion following the original post for details) is still beyond me. It should break it, or it shouldn't, and when it breaks it smbd should be able to give some message as to why ... but it doesn't. I wonder if the more recent X version of Samba is likely to work better, or of the breakage here is related to using smbpasswd? Whit On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 09:21:28AM -0400, Whit Blauvelt wrote: > We've got a fresh CentOS 5.4 box, and the only glitch so far is that > /etc/init.d/smb doesn't start smbd. It claims it does - shows "[ok]" - but > only nmbd ends up running. Even setting a higher debugging level in the smbd > flags, nothing logs or shows on the console as to why smbd is immediatly > quitting. > > To make it stranger, doing this works fine: > > . /etc/init.d/functions > daemon smbd -D > > That's the core of how the /etc/init.d/smb file is set up to start it. > Except from there it's not working - despite the reported "[ok]". > > Anyone seen this, or have advice on how to debug it? > > Thanks, > Whit