my actual problem is trying to debug a init script to start Resque. It works fine run as root from the command line, but does nothing on boot. It has some proper insserv headers and I've run updaterc.d to create the symlinks, and checked that they exist. The script is +x. # find /etc/rc*.d -name \*resque\* /etc/rc0.d/K01resque /etc/rc1.d/K01resque /etc/rc2.d/S01resque /etc/rc3.d/S01resque /etc/rc4.d/S01resque /etc/rc5.d/S01resque /etc/rc6.d/K01resque # ls -l /etc/init.d/resque -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2093 Oct 24 03:02 /etc/init.d/resque the script can be viewed here if you like. It uses lsb functions to log messages, which essentially echo() to STDOUT I believe. So where does the output go during startup? It's not in /var/log/*log