> The logs show nothing. What could have been so horribly corrupted by > the hanging smbd that it refuses to start now?strace is your friend.
[strace attached] It gets stranger still - after my experiments in single mode I rebooted the box in normal mode and it came up ok, just eth0 wasn't configured. (It does that sometimes with all my testing boxes, probably an udev / initramfs glitch.) After ifup eth0 everything was fine, including samba. Thinking I was imagining things I rebooted again: network from the get-go but samba hang at startup. Turns out samba hangs at startup only if eth0 is up. /etc/init.d/samba start ... hangs ifdown eth0 && /etc/init.d/samba start && ifup eth0 ... works Could something on the LAN confuse samba thus? The other smb clients and servers on the same network are unaffected. Thanks, C.
samba.strace
Description: Binary data
