The init program starts every time the computer is booted.

A line in init's configuration file, /etc/inittab, tells init to run, and to restart if necessary, svscanboot.

svscanboot checks the directory /service every few seconds. If it sees a subdirectory there, it looks for a file in the subdirectory called run. Hence, the aolserver instance for your development server is started by the file /service/openacs-dev/run. But we use a symlink to make it easier to add and remove stuff from the /service, so the actual location is /usr/local/aolserver/daemontools/openacs-dev/run.

When aolserver starts, it uses a control file to figure out what to do. The run file tells it which control file to use, and that file is /usr/local/aolserver/openacs-dev.tcl. The aolserver control file specifies many interesting things, including the location of the aolserver logs. Aolserver errors and status information are written to /usr/local/aolserver/log/openacs-dev-error.log. The http server log, i.e. the list of incoming requests, is at /usr/local/aolserver/log/openacs-dev.log

Aolserver also uses the PostgreSQL database. The database server is controlled by the System V init scripts; these are the files and links in /etc/init.d.