Mandrake 8.2 that is using initscirpts very much like RedHat. Standard configuration boots with OK/FAIL indication for every service started on bootup that looks approximately like Starting syslog-ng: [ OK ] - or - [FAIL] Note that "success" or "fail" means simply application returned 0/non-0 exit code. Syslog-ng forks off very early, even before it starts to parse configuration file. It means that any error (even any fatal error) is not ever reported back so startup always appears to succeed. This is confusing. Looking in source, it appears that any possible startup errors happen in make_syslog_config() (of course, there can be run-time errors but that is different matter). Any reason why make_syslog_config() cannot be moved before fork? -andrej