It that parses the LSB information in init scripts

These are system facility names in Linux Standard Base. They're not treated like shell variables, they're just special names allowing init scripts to depend on certain system states.

In particular, $remote_fs and $syslog are defined as follows:

$remote_fs

all remote file systems are available. In some configurations, file systems such as /usr may be remote. Many applications that require $local_fs will probably also require $remote_fs.

$syslog

system logger is operational.

chkconfig only reads the "Default-Start" lines when calculating the runlevels for scripts. It counts the number of runlevels and only calls insserv if at least one runlevel is requested in "Default-Start"...

Workarounds which avoid this behaviour include:

• enabling services with chkconfig -a;
• disabling services with chkconfig -d;
• using insserv directly, insserv service to enable service, insserv -r service to remove it.