In linux, init is the first process started during booting of the computer system. Init is a daemon process that continues running until the system is shut down. It is the direct or indirect ancestor of all other processes.
A process that run as a service in the background is called a daemon process and is a child process of init. Such process/service shall be initialize by running a customized shell script that was put in a folder called etc/init.d.
Running a shell script located in etc/init.d will start the daemon process immediately, but this daemon process will not automatically start after system reboot. To add a certain daemon process into the booting list, a command called chkconfig shall be used in the following manner "chkconfig --add COMMAND ".