I'm trying to troubleshoot an issue on a MediaTemple server (running CentOS5) where the DNS cache has grown stale - I think because nscd has crashed. I've tried restarting nscd:

# service nscd restart
Stopping nscd:                                             [FAILED]
Starting nscd:                                             [  OK  ]

This makes sense since I believe nscd has crashed so it shouldn't already be running, but When I view the status of nscd:

# service nscd status
nscd dead but subsys locked

And ps -A returns no processes related to nscd (I assume because it's dead). I've edited /etc/nscd.conf and uncommented the line that defines the location for the log file. It created the file but it never writes anything to it.

I tried looking at the init script but found that it's no help since the script thinks everything is running fine - the service returns that it started up correctly.

How do I 'unlock' the subsys that nscd is complaining about?