thanks Lars and tunia for the holding of hands the trace file looks like a very good approach; i also think i should investigate file ownership and privileges as a possible cause of the problem -- this because the server starts up fine if i execute the start method as root
"svcadm clear dns/server" didn't change anything that i could detect but exited without an error message svcs -xv oddly doesn't appear to recognize the named process that i started at the command line; i suppose because the rest of the information smf gets from the "xml" code associated with the start method was absent This message posted from opensolaris.org
