ipchains is started before the network comes up and therefore before NFS filesystems are started. Well, that's how it should/must be. However, the ipchains startup script uses /usr/bin/cut which is not yet available if /usr is a NFS filesystem.
Fixed in ipchains-1.3.9-15. Thanks!
The sed scripts need more work though: # service ipchains start /etc/init.d/ipchains: [: 16-21: integer expression expected How about: KERNELMIN=`uname -r | sed 's,.*\.\([0-9]\+\)\(-.*\)\?,\1,g'`
Er, yeah. Fixed (really, I mean it this time) in ipchains-1.3.9-16.