The common services/daemons management arrangement in Linux is a 
start/stop/reset/status script in /etc/init.d/ for each service, kicked off by 
trigger specs in /etc/rc.d/, which in turn is managed via the chkconfig 
command, conventionally via corresponding chkconfig numbers coded near the top 
of the /etc/init.d/ script. This is to say that when the system boots at a 
certain run level, appropriate services are started per what is in /etc/rc.d/.

Richard Sims
Boston University