Failure on startup "permission denied"

We're running with a virtual hosting provider using FreeBSD. They like to run a tight ship so rather than doing the install myself, I had the hosting provider run make clean install ejabberd (after applying a critical patch to their source tree).

They told me the install ran correctly however there was no /usr/local/etc/ejabberd.cfg, so I took the sample provided and changed just one line:

root@03 /usr/local/etc : diff ejabberd.cfg ejabberd.cfg.sample
96c96
< {hosts, "03.rigel.zettai.net"}.
---
> {hosts, ["localhost"]}.

I also had already run ejabberd 0.9.1 out of my user directory just to make sure the configuration would work so I did have to create the user "ejabberd" in group "jabber" as well as a home directory. Everything ran fine.

However, running the "officially installed" version with
/usr/local/etc/rc.d/ejabberd.sh start

results in a system that thinks the name of the server is "03"

...
=PROGRESS REPORT==== 1-Aug-2005::12:32:58 ===
application: sasl
started_at: ejabberd@03
...

and then bombs off with a "permission denied":

...

=PROGRESS REPORT==== 1-Aug-2005::12:32:59 ===
application: ssl
started_at: ejabberd@03

=CRASH REPORT==== 1-Aug-2005::12:32:59 ===
crasher:
pid: <0.35.0>
registered_name: []
error_info: "invalid return value from ejabberd_app:start(normal,[]) -> {'EX
IT',\"permission denied\"}"
initial_call: {application_master,init,
[<0.5.0>,
<0.34.0>,
{appl_data,

...