From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2b) Gecko/20021016 Description of problem: In the most recent update to xinetd (xinetd-2.3.9-0.73.i386.rpm), an addition to the init script was added to test if /etc/passwd was writable by the user running the script (ie, make sure he's root). # Check that we can write to it... so non-root users stop here [ -w /etc/passwd ] || exit 1 Using RedHat 7.3 (probably 7.2 and other versions) have sh-utils-2.0.11-14. If you chattr +i /etc/passwd, the above test fails. I tried this on debian with sh-utils 2.0.12 and it worked ok, so I'm guessing they just added an immutable check inside 'test' itself. My suggestion would be to use test -O instead or a real id=0 type check. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. chattr +i /etc/passwd 2. rpm -i xinetd-2.3.9-0.73.i386.rpm 3. /etc/init.d/xinetd restart (should do nothing) Actual Results: xinetd doesn't start Additional info: