[Samba] Samba Locking database problem

[Ruben Fagundo]

There must be something obvious that I am doing wrong.  I have two machines 
running RH 7.2

One works fine and the other is giving me this error when I do an 'smbstatus'
================================
Samba version 2.2.1a
Service      uid      gid      pid     machine
----------------------------------------------

Failed to open byte range locking database
ERROR: Failed to initialise locking database
Can't initialise locking module - exiting
==================================

the odd thing is that smbd, and nmbd start fine with no errors reported in 
the log file even with a log level of 3.

The route command reports the following:
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
192.168.1.0     *               255.255.255.0   U     0      0        0 eth0
127.0.0.0       *               255.0.0.0       U     0      0        0 lo
default         192.168.1.1     0.0.0.0         UG    0      0        0 eth0

The machine with problems does NOT have a Fully Qualified Domain 
Name.  Could that be the problem ?

I tried installing 2.2.3a and now I get the following error message:
===========================================
Samba version 2.2.3a
Service      uid      gid      pid     machine
----------------------------------------------

tdb((null)): tdb_open_ex: could not open file /var/cache/samba/brlock.tdb: 
No such file or directory
Failed to open byte range locking database
tdb((null)): tdb_open_ex: could not open file /var/cache/samba/locking.tdb: 
No such file or directory
ERROR: Failed to initialise locking database
Can't initialise locking module - exiting
===========================================
A directory listing of the directory /var/cache/samba

[root at school samba]# ls -la
total 36
drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root         4096 Apr 17 14:36 .
drwxr-xr-x    7 root     root         4096 Apr 17 14:08 ..
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root          142 Apr 17 14:36 browse.dat
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root         8192 Apr 17 14:35 connections.tdb
-rw-------    1 root     root          696 Apr 17 14:35 messages.tdb
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root           20 Apr 17 14:35 nmbd.pid
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root           20 Apr 17 14:35 smbd.pid
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root          286 Apr 17 14:35 wins.dat

I checked the path to that directory and root has rwx privileges to each 
directory down the path, so since everything appears as I would have 
expected, might someone have any idea what is going on??

BTW, these two machine are on different networks, at different sites.  They 
both act as PDC, on 192.168.1.X and both sit behind separate firewalls.

Suggestion welcomed,
Ruben