vBulletin Manual - 4) Making MySQL Start Up with Your Server

If you want to set up your MySQL server to run automatically whenever the system is running (just like your Web server probably does), you'll have to set it up to do so. In the share/mysql subdirectory of the MySQL directory, you'll find a script called mysql.server that can be added to your system startup routines to do this.

Assuming you've set up a special MySQL user to run the MySQL server, you'll need to edit the mysql.server script before you use it. Open it in your favorite text editor and change the mysql_daemon_user setting to refer to the user you created above:

mysql_daemon_user=mysqlusr

Setting up the script to be run by your system at startup is a highly operating system-dependant task. If you're not using RedHat Linux and you're not sure of how to do this, you'd be best to ask someone who knows. In RedHat Linux, the following commands (starting in the MySQL directory) will do the trick:

cp share/mysql/mysql.server /etc/rc.d/init.d/
cd /etc/rc.d/init.d
chmod 500 mysql.server
cd /etc/rc.d/rc3.d
ln -s ../init.d/mysql.server S99mysql
cd /etc/rc.d/rc5.d
ln -s ../init.d/mysql.server S99mysql

That's it! To test that this works, you can reboot your system and request the status of the server as before to make sure it runs properly at startup.