"When you install a new Linux server distribution, you can often install all of the daemons you'll need to run on that machine at install time. Distribution vendors present a 'ready to go' distribution by supplying initialization scripts for all of the services you might run. But what happens if you're building from source, and no init script is supplied? What if you're writing the source and haven't ever built an init script? Here are a few ways to cope when you're faced with this challenge.
"You can handle initialization in several different ways. One option is to place the commands used to start up a daemon into /etc/rc.d/rc.local file. This method is very simple: Cut and paste the instructions the README gives to start the daemon, and that's your initialization. Unfortunately, this method goes against what most systems are set up to do by default, which is to use init scripts..."
