Introduction

Your Virtual Private Server is equipped with the ability to automatically start daemons (server processes or programs initiated at boot time that wait in the background until its service is required) during host server reboot. This service insures that important daemons that you rely on are restarted when a server is taken down during scheduled maintenance and rebooted. To take advantage of this feature, you need to create scripts to run the programs you would like to run at system startup and save them in the /usr/local/etc/rc.d/ directory. You can either create these file locally on your local computer and upload it to your Virtual Private Server (in ASCII mode), or you can edit the file on your Virtual Private Server using your favorite Unix file editor, such as pico or vi. Many programs create scripts for you, and you can see examples of some in your /usr/local/etc/rc.d/ directory. The file format is quite simple. Lines that begin with the "#" character are considered to be comments and are ignored. All other lines are executed with /bin/sh, or in other words, are executed exactly as if you typed the command at a command prompt. For more information on creating shell scripts such as your rc startup scripts, consult a UNIX administration book or the FreeBSD handbook.