Sounds like in your current setup the system tries to start FreeRADIUS before the MySQL daemon has finished starting up, so when FR attempts to connect to the database, the database isn't ready for connections yet and the startup fails. When you launch it manually later on, MySQL has started and things connect fine. I'm honestly not sure how to handle this elegantly - the "obvious" answer of making the service file wait until the database is running is distinctly non-trivial because the service file has no way of knowing /which/ type of database server it needs to wait on, or whether the database server it needs to connect to is even on the same system (mine aren't, for example). Doesn't the FR daemon regard "can't connect to the database server" as a "temporary problem, keep running and try again later" type of error rather than "everything is terrible, terminate right away" error? --Rens.