BobDoolittle

This answer is obsolete. The word now appears in dictionaries and google searches and is in common use in the software workplace. dictionary.com/browse/performant dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/performant performantcorp.com

I have updated my answer with what I've communicated to you. Would appreciate you marking it as "Answered". Cheers.

One advantage of the RC approach is that it would be portable to any Linux distro. Upstart is Ubuntu-specific. Everybody else uses Systemd (and Ubuntu will also, some day - Upstarts days are numbered).

Lol you'd be better off with Upstart, which will start your service immediately if it terminates unexpectedly. But that'll work. If you want to finess it, you can run "strace -o /tmp/strace.out -f YOUR_SCRIPT". Then look at /tmp/strace.out and see how many fork() calls there are. Then you could craft a proper Upstart script which would immediately restart your service when it dies.

Sure, let me write something more concise. Does this mean it's working for you?

Note that these simple RC scripts will start a service. They will not restart it if it dies. If you really need to do that manually (i.e. if the service itself doesn't handle the restarting), you will have to use Upstart directly as we started to discuss. But this can be a good test to see how far you can get with the simpler approach.

(I mean INIT INFO contents)

That instruments your RC script into the necessary runlevels for boot time, based on the contents of the INIT INFO script

So once you've edited your file, say it's called foobar (probably your Provides should match the file name), you can run: update-rc.d foobar enable

Sorry - forgot a step. Yes the init info is used by update-rc.d. Documentation is here: wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts

I've never used chat before, and don't know how notifications work. I'll be working in another window so might not see your response, when it comes. I've enabled "desktop notification", whatever that is, so hopefully I will.

Reboot your system, and let me know how it goes.

That's it.

4. Change the lines in the start) block to run your scripts. Leave the ";;" at the end.

3. Delete these lines:

(basically change everything but Default-Start)

2. Edit the file. Change the INIT INFO section by altering the descriptions and clearing out the Required-Start and Required-Stop fields. Make a new name for Provides.

1. Go to /etc/init.d, and make a copy of dns-clean (rename it as you like).

In fact, let's just try it. We'll just use the RC mechanism (which Upstart runs, but it's a simpler, legacy mechanism):

If they do, then it's just a question of ensuring they start at boot time. Easily done. Let me know.

Often, processes that background themselves will do their own monitoring/restarting if they die for some reason. Are you sure these do not?

Unfortunately that's not so easy. You'd need to use strace. Is there a man page? Is there an option to run it in foreground? I'm going to try moving this discussion to chat, as StackExchange keeps nudging us to do.

You'll have to do your own footwork. I won't research it for you. Try running it by hand. Do you get a shell prompt, while it runs in background, or does it keep running in the foreground?

Well, at a guess I'd say you don't want it to start if you stop it manually :-). This is the sort of thing Upstart does very easily. I'll update my answer with an example. You do need to know something about how the service starts: i.e. does it just run in the foreground? Or does it fork itself into the background? Does it fork twice (this is common for some services)?

Do you really need events? Or do you just want to run a job that gets started at boot and restarted when it dies? Maybe you can be more specific about what kind of events you want to handle, and the relationship/dependencies of your job to other jobs on the system (if any).

Yes Upstart should be installed on any base Ubuntu distro. You can verify by doing: "dpkg-query -l upstart"