Having applied your patch to autofs and reenabling insserv, I had to reinstall portmap to get its links in /etc/rc*d so that when nis started, the portmapper was enabled.
Once I'd done that, autofs is still starting before nis: ws-andyc-debian64:~# ls /etc/rc*d/*{nis,autofs} /etc/rc0.d/K01autofs /etc/rc2.d/S15nis /etc/rc4.d/S15nis /etc/rc1.d/K01autofs /etc/rc3.d/S02autofs /etc/rc5.d/S02autofs /etc/rc1.d/K01nis /etc/rc3.d/S15nis /etc/rc5.d/S15nis /etc/rc2.d/S02autofs /etc/rc4.d/S02autofs /etc/rc6.d/K01autofs It's not clear to me from "man insserv" whether that's OK or not. It could be that "Should-Start:" is taken care of when autofs is started. Having thought about that, that would mean that whatever nis is dependent on would also need starting before nis is started and that would lead to working out dependencies on the fly: that seems counter to the purpose of creating the links in the respective directories in the first place so that cannot be right. So there must be something else awry. I did try reinstalling nis to see whether that would help (it didn't). -- Andy, BlueArc Engineering -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org