Hello,

I have a number of Opensuse 11.1 x86 machines. Their hardware is largely or completely identical, as is their disk image, because I've cloned them using dd.

When init starts services, I find that it blocks on the portmap daemon service. When I disabled that in Yast, auditd blocked in much the same manner instead (which wasn't blocking previously). When I disabled that, syslog blocked instead. The blocking lasts for over 5 minutes. I also find that a utility that should be started by boot.local isn't. I cannot ping my default gateway on an affected machine, for no good reason.

When I ps aux | grep auditd (for example) I can see that auditd does eventually start. It's just a mystery as to why it blocks. I couldn't find anything untoward in /var/log, although admittedly I am no expert at analysing log files.

A few weeks ago, I replaced one of the clones, which was faulty as described. Now, the issue has arisen again. I'd like to understand the problem, and learn from it.

What should I do? Can it be fixed?

I've run my distro's recovery disk, which runs fsck on all partitions among other things. This didn't bring anything up.

Thanks,
Sternocera