Hi,
I have a redhat box 9 with a custom compiled 2.4.20 kernel (vanilla). I was going along just fine till I found that a number of my service's were not running. I went and checked on there status but found that they are dead but subsys locked. I went to /var/lock/subsys and tried deleting sendmail and restarting it but it failed to shut down and restart was sucessful. yet it is still dead. Here is my service --status-all
[root@localhost sbin]# ./service --status-all edited for subsys locked.
anacron dead but subsys locked
apmd is stopped
arpwatch is stopped
atd dead but subsys locked
Configured Mount Points:
------------------------

Active Mount Points:
--------------------

crond dead but subsys locked
httpd is stopped
Table: filter
Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target prot opt source destination

Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT)
target prot opt source destination

Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target prot opt source destination
i
sshd dead but subsys locked

any help would be dearly appreciated.

You should look at /var/log/messages as you attempt to restart some of the services. THere should be an error generated that would help find the problem.

so David, I started with crond and did a service crond restart and then service crond reload. afterwards I checked the /var/log/messages and it told me that the service shutdown failed. I thought perhaps I had a mislink in my /etc/rc5.d/ dir but that turned false. I could not locate any reason for the failure. Then I deleted the files in /var/lock/subsys, and that got rid of the problem with subsys locked. then I restarted the services and found that the service was once again dead and locked. any suggestions?

If you do a restart twice without doing anything else, and the stop part fails on the second restart then it should be in the log files why it failed to start and run properly. If it's not in the log files try another service. Some services may have better logging of errors than others, and they may both be failing due to the same problem.

I am also having this problem. I am unable to use sendmail at all.

[root@yuzuki sbin]# service sendmail status
sendmail dead but subsys locked

anyone know how to fix this?

Delete the lock file in /var/lock/subsys.

Check the log files to see why it's craashing, /var/log/maillog, /var/log/messages.