[tlug] mystery of the disappearing services

[Tony Laszlo <laszlo@example.com>]

I experienced the following strangeness on my main 
Linux box. After booting, I noticed that I couldn't 
bring up X. Then I noticed that gpm was not running. 
Nor was cardmgr. ntsysv (this is RH7.1) showed that 
all the usual services were set to run on startup. 
After rebooting I still found myself in that situation, 
with most (it seems) of the services that can be started 
from  /etc/rc.d/init.d/ down. 

This is what is in there, btw: 

anacron            identd             nfs                senddmail.rpmsave
apmd               iplog              nfslock            sendmail
atd                iptables           nscd               single
atok12se           kdcrotate          pcmcia             sshd
autofs             keytable           portmap            syslog
crond              killall            postgresql         xfs
functions          kudzu              random             xinetd
gpm                lpd                rawdevices         
halt               netfs              rhnsd              
httpd              network            rwhod 

I started up this one and that one, and tried rebooting. 
At one point I tried starting up just about everyone 
that was down, and then rebooted. 

That time, the services came up and I was able to 
go into X, run the pcmcia and everything else, as 
normal. 

Any idea on what could have happened and why the 
problem went away (just in case it comes back again)? 

Thanks!