On 10 Aug 2011, at 09:55, Mark Rogers wrote:

.. I get an email at 3am telling me that start-stop-daemon can't be found, so I assume that the environment isn't set up correctly?

# which start-stop-daemon

/sbin/start-stop-daemon

Note that /etc/init.d/xxx is hand-crafted so could well be at fault here.

Most scripts in /etc/init.d seem to set their PATH explicitly to include /sbin. Try that.

-- Martijn