Newbie trying to support a system

I know very little about the Linux world, but I have been thrown in the deep end of supporting a system for my company without the luxury of time to learn about it before this problem.

My server quit sending or receiving e-mails (we are using qmail), and with the boot, I can see the glaring issue that inetxd does not start (FAILED).  If I do a "services xinetd status", I get "xinetd dead but subsys locked".

The system is a little old, running Red Hat 7.2 if that matters.

Like I said, I am so new to this, I don't have any idea on where to start.  Can anyone help me troubleshoot this?  If you need additional information, let me know and I will post it.

Thanks in advance for any help.  My company is crippled while this is going on.

Keith Boyle
[email protected]