inittab and telinit problems

Hi,

A client of a client has a SuSE 7.1 server. Since a recent reboot
their dial-in functionality has not worked. Looking at the
/etc/inittab file, there was no uncommented mgetty line (not sure how
it worked before reboot). This has now been rectified, and a "telinit
q" was issued.

However, init seems to be refusing to start mgetty. The messages log
shows the following line after a "telinit q" has been issued, but no
other associated lines:

Jun 23 10:51:47 dbsrvr init: Re-reading inittab

There are no new messages in the /var/log/mgetty.ttyS0 file, and no
mgetty processes are running. Starting mgetty from the command line
"works" in the sense that the process starts, but of course it is
unusable unless started by init. Here's the relevant line from
/etc/inittab.

mo:12345:respawn:/usr/sbin/mgetty -s 38400 -x 3 /dev/ttyS0

In short, it seems like "telinit q" makes init re-read the
/etc/inittab file, and yet it doesn't decide to try starting mgetty.

A reboot wouldn't be a good option, as this is a production system.
But then, this is Linux so we won't need to do that, will we? ;)

Any ideas would be gratefully received.

Aaron.