Description of problem: After kickstarting a new server today, when xinetd started, it complained that the port for rsync (port 873) was already in use. As it happens, it was in use by rpc.statd. Looking at the source for rpc.statd, if a port number hasn't been specified, it looks like it relies on bind to get a port number. I may be wrong. However, /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_local_port_range contains 32768 61000 ... so bind should never have used port 873? Afterwards, we created /etc/sysconfig/nfs containing: STATD_PORT=32765 STATD_OUTGOING_PORT=32766 ... which solved the problem, but we've never had to do this on any of our other servers before. On our other servers, rpc.statd is also using a port less than 1024 -- 773 on one other host. I don't know how bind determines the address to use. I'm not exactly sure where to report this bug, so I'll report it here, and hope that you can change the "Component" appropriately. Thanks..
The port space is first come first server... so it is possible for statd to "steal" other well know ports... You took the correct action...