The attached patch tidies up how xend becomes a daemon, and it hooks up the "restart" and "status" commands. Details: I attempted to start xend from SuSE''s YaST, but YaST hung waiting on xend to start. Turns out that xend wasn''t quite becoming a daemon. setsid was conditionally called for xend, and never called for xfrd. Stdin, stdout, and stderr were left open and this is what hung YaST. Daemon.(start|status) now return LSB-defined error codes. I realize the python scripts are probably meant to be cross platform, but it seemed cleaner to inheirit a few LSB error codes here, rather than create my own and then try to remap them up in /etc/init.d/xend. I still suspect Linux distributions will write their own /etc/init.d/xend scripts, but at least now the stock one behaves a little better.