Here at Recorded Future we use Ubuntu (running on Amazon EC2), but so far we have not explored Ubuntu Upstart that much. During the holidays I made an effort to get acquainted with Upstart and to implement proper MySQL start and stop with it.

If you do not know Upstart, this is the way you start and stop services in Ubuntu, and it serves the same purpose as the old /etc/init.d scripts, but are a bit more structured and powerful. That said, Upstart is regrettably far from complete, although the functionality is much better and Upstart has some cool features, some things do not work that well. For one thing, documentation, where it exists, is useless, at best. Secondly, there is very limited ability to test and develop Upstart scripts. And this is made worse by the fact that the documentation is so bad. Another thing is that Upstart insist on stopping services, by default, by …