For those of you following along at home, this is part of a cookbook style instruction set for getting spamgourmet going, but because of screwed up permission logic I can’t post this section there.

The captcha is for validating humanity when creating spamgourmet accounts. We’re going to limit what parts of the OS it can tromp over:

sudo useradd -c "captcha server for spamgourmet" -f -1 -M -r captcha
sudo /bin/mkdir -p /var/www-spamgourmet/captchasrv/
sudo chown -R captcha /usr/local/lib/spamgourmet/captchasrv/
sudo chown -R captcha /var/www-spamgourmet/captcha

Now we make our one-line shell script for running the daemon

sudo nano /etc/init.d/captcha.sh

#!/bin/sh
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          captchasrv
# Required-Start:    $local_fs $network
# Required-Stop:     $local_fs
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:      0 1 6
# Short-Description: captchasrv
# Description:       captcha daemon for spamgourmet
### END INIT INFO
sudo -u captcha perl /usr/local/lib/spamgourmet/captchasrv/captchasrv.pl &
Next we get it going

sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/captcha.sh
sudo update-rc.d captcha.sh defaults

And check if that worked, there should be about four entries:

ps -aux | grep captc

Now the captcha server will start whenever the computer starts.