Why won't my init.d service start?

Question

I bought a Raspberry Pi 3 a couple of weeks ago and have been playing with it for a long while. I'm running Raspbian Lite headless and one thing I want to do is run some stuff on boot. Nothing exciting, just a few commands, but I am finding that very difficult to do. I will be using a simplified example of my script, but this is what I've worked it down to and this is what I can't make work. Here's what I've done so far:

Created a file, /etc/init.d/sanity

#!/bin/sh
# /etc/init.d/sanity

# If you want a command to always run, put it here
echo "sanity script is running"

# Carry out specific functions when asked to by the system
case "$1" in
  start)
    echo "START START START"
    echo "START START START" > /root/START.txt
    ;;
  stop)
    echo "STOP STOP STOP"
    echo "STOP STOP STOP" > /root/STOP.txt
    ;;
  *)
    echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/sanity {start|stop}"
    echo "FAIL FAIL FAIL" > /root/FAIL.txt
    exit 1
    ;;
esac

exit 0

Then modified the permissions with:

chmod 755 /etc/init.d/sanity

Which seems to work:

root@raspberrypi:/etc/init.d|⇒  ll
total 304
    ...blah blah blah...
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root  493 Aug 13 23:09 sanity
    ...blah blah blah...

And, manually run, that seems to work:

root@raspberrypi:/etc/init.d|⇒  sh sanity start
sanity script is running
START START START
root@raspberrypi:/etc/init.d|⇒  sh sanity stop
sanity script is running
STOP STOP STOP
root@raspberrypi:/etc/init.d|⇒  sh sanity
sanity script is running
Usage: /etc/init.d/sanity {start|stop}
root@raspberrypi:/etc/init.d|⇒  cat /root/STOP.txt
STOP STOP STOP
root@raspberrypi:/etc/init.d|⇒  cat /root/START.txt
START START START
root@raspberrypi:/etc/init.d|⇒  cat /root/FAIL.txt
FAIL FAIL FAIL

Looks good. Now, I set it to run on boot, then try to start it like a service... but nothing happens.

root@raspberrypi:/etc/init.d|⇒  update-rc.d sanity defaults
insserv: warning: script 'K01sanity' missing LSB tags and overrides
insserv: warning: script 'sanity' missing LSB tags and overrides
root@raspberrypi:/etc/init.d|⇒  service sanity start
root@raspberrypi:/etc/init.d|⇒  ls /root
configurations
root@raspberrypi:/etc/init.d|⇒

So, what am I doing wrong here? Is there something special about Raspberry Pis that I'm missing? I know for sure that I've done this before with Ubuntu and Debian and I've never had this much trouble. It's driving me nuts.

Answer 1

( Sorry @Gogeta70 )

I did actually end up using systemd. Here's an example of a dropbox service I got working that depends on two things:

[Unit]

Description=Dropbox as a system service
After=local-fs.target network.target

[Service]
User=me
Restart=always
ExecStart=/opt/dropbox/dropboxd
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=1

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

I named the file dropbox.service and put it in /etc/systemd/system/

Answer 2

Use systemd for service management.