I'll throw my hat in the ring here and point out daemon-manager: http://porkrind.org/daemon-manager/ http://porkrind.org/daemon-manager/ It was designed to be

I'll throw my hat in the ring here and point out daemon-manager: http://porkrind.org/daemon-manager/ http://porkrind.org/daemon-manager/ It was designed to be simple (creating a new daemon conf file is trivial), low over-head (it's very init-ish in function so it needs to not take a lot of memory or processor time), stable (can't crash or it loses track of everything that it launched), and secure (lets you launch your daemons as different users--usually at a lower security level). I've been using it myself an almost every server I administrate (I wrote it to scratch my own itch) for a couple years now and it's been very stable.