In case anyone cares, I figured it out: 1) I have no idea what caused the password error. Changing my config to use root, running ser once, then going back to user "ser" fixed that error. 2) I didn't have domain.so loaded, and need it for one of my statements. 3) something about ser doesn't currently like my startup script in /etc/rc.d/init.d/ - but running ser -P /var/run/ser.pid works fine for now - at least I'm back online. Thank you Marian Dumitru for pointing out that the config overrides the command line - I wouldn't have solved this without that bit of knowledge! Rob