I have had the same thing on Debian 5.0.8. With samba installed from backports version. 2:3.5.6~dfsg-3~bpo50+1
Samba was being killed at runlevels 2 3 4 5. # ls -l /etc/rc?.d/*samba* lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 2011-05-09 11:06 /etc/rc2.d/K20samba -> ../init.d/samba lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 2011-05-09 11:06 /etc/rc3.d/K20samba -> ../init.d/samba lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 2011-05-09 11:06 /etc/rc4.d/K20samba -> ../init.d/samba lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 2011-05-09 11:06 /etc/rc5.d/K20samba -> ../init.d/samba To fix I ran as root # update-rc.d -f samba remove # update-rc.d samba defaults
