I ran into a little issue the other day, where try as I might, Riak did not want to start automatically on system boot.
No matter how many times I ran chkconfig riak on, it would not start. Even checking & ensuring all the correct
symbolic links were created in the /etc/rc*.d directories yielded nothing wrong.
Then I ran across an issue that was logged on Github, which described this inability to start on boot. There is a very simple fix for it, as I have since discovered.
Open up your /etc/sudoers file using the command sudo visudo -f /etc/sudoers.
Once there, find the line that contains Defaults requiretty, and comment that line out.
Upon rebooting, you should find that Riak starts up automatically.