Problem solved.
The problem was that vnetd daemon was running, but bpcd daemon refused to start.
In UNIX world, vnetd creates a socket, on the filesystem where it resides. If that filesystem is on a NFS mount, even if you (even as root) have all the right permissions to create and delete files in that filesystem, you do not have the right to modify the file in order to create it as a socket. So, the resolution was to export the filesystem through NFS, using the NFS option of 'no_root_squash'.
Thanks for your time.
bogdan