Why Does Samba Server Fail to Start with PANIC Error?

SOLVED!!!!!!!!!!!

I have a script that was starting Samba (NMBD, SMBD) as well as OpenLDAP (SLAPD). It's an RC script that reads configuration data from a file to determine, among other things, which processes are already running or if a dependent process fails to start, etc... Here is a snippet of the relevant part in the script. The last line copies a version of the nsswitch.conf into place that specifies to use LDAP lookups.

while [ $i -lt $MAXPROCS ];
  do
   PID=${PROC[$i]}
   StartProc $PID

   if test $? != 0; then
    echo "!!! Aborting Any Remaining Start-up Processes !!!"
    exit 1
   fi

  i=$(($i+1))
done

 cp /etc/rc.d/pozix/nsswitch.conf.ldap /etc/nsswitch.conf

And upon shutdown I was doing the following; notice I copy a nsswitch.conf file that has "noldap" entries in it.

while [ $i -lt $MAXPROCS ];
do
  PID=${PROC[$i]}
  StopProc $PID
  i=$(($i+1))
done

cp /etc/rc.d/pozix/nsswitch.conf.noldap /etc/nsswitch.conf

It turns out that in the start-up scenario, samba wants the nsswtich.conf content to have the ldap entries there prior to invocation. Here is what I did to fix my issues:

cp /etc/rc.d/pozix/nsswitch.conf.ldap /etc/nsswitch.conf

while [ $i -lt $MAXPROCS ];
  do
   PID=${PROC[$i]}
   StartProc $PID

   if test $? != 0; then
    cp /etc/rc.d/pozix/nsswitch.conf.noldap /etc/nsswitch.conf
    echo "!!! Aborting Any Remaining Start-up Processes !!!"
    exit 1
   fi

  i=$(($i+1))
done

In summary, it appears that how you start SMBD is just as important as when you start it. If you start SMBD when nsswitch.conf has no LDAP entries, you get a version of smbd running linked to nss_ldap.so thinking it should only rely upon /etc/passwd (if that is all that is in the nsswitch.conf file) and changing the nsswitch.conf contents after SMBD is running has no effect.

Hope this helps other system builders....

You have 'encrypt passwords = yes'. From smb.conf (Samba 3):

... In order for encrypted passwords to work correctly smbd(8) must either have access to a local smbpasswd(5) file (see the smbpasswd(8) program for information on how to set up and maintain this file), or set the security = [server|domain|ads] parameter which causes smbd to authenticate against another server. ...

You also have 'security = user' (i.e. none of [server|domain|ads]).