Looking more closely the problem seems to affect the sl52 boxes I can look at but not sl50 or sl51 systems (as far as I can tell anyway). A quick peek at the startup scripts shows nothing obviously different but adding a trivial patch to /etc/rc.d/init.d/nfslock makes it work as expected on at least one sl52 box (see attached patch). Without the patch the lockd kernel module may nto be loaded at the point that we attempt the sysctl and so it silently fails, when something else pulls in lockd (nfs for example) those values are left at the default so it picks a random port. I was debugging it by adding: /usr/sbin/rpcinfo -p /sbin/sysctl fs.nfs.nlm_tcpport fs.nfs.nlm_udpport at various points and noticed that the sysctl was failing with: + /sbin/sysctl fs.nfs.nlm_tcpport fs.nfs.nlm_udpport error: "fs.nfs.nlm_tcpport" is an unknown key error: "fs.nfs.nlm_udpport" is an unknown key and that was just after the sysctl -w calls... [ So it seems we need to do the sysctl AFTER lockd is loaded but BEFORE anything tries to use it ] Now I don't really understand why this wasn't needed in sl50/sl51, they seem to have the identical startup scripts in this area though sysctl program itself has indeed changed. -- /--------------------------------------------------------------------\ | "Computers are different from telephones. Computers do not ring." | | -- A. Tanenbaum, "Computer Networks", p. 32 | ---------------------------------------------------------------------| | Jon Peatfield, _Computer_ Officer, DAMTP, University of Cambridge | | Mail: [log in to unmask] Web: http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/ | \--------------------------------------------------------------------/