when `scontrol show daemons` returns nothing…

Slurm uses the

scontrol show daemons

command to figure out what it should run on the machine it is being invoked on. If you have a config file error, that command will return a blank line.

And /etc/init.d/slurm-llnl will exit without starting anything up.

scontrol will give you no indication of the nature of the configuration error. For that, use

slurmctld -Dvvvv

It’ll probably boil down to some dns/hostname related issue.