As a long time Redhat / Fedora user, starting daemons on system boot in Debian has been a mystery. I recently took the time to search for the answer, rather than placing the start command in the rc.local file and it’s not that bad. As long as the init script exists in /etc/init.d, run the following command to set it to persist:
update-rc.d <daemon> defaults
This handy tip was taken from the official debian docs at:
http://www.debian.org/doc/FAQ/ch-customizing.en.html