Setting up svnserve as a service on RHEL5/CentOS system

If you've not already got a script for starting the service in /etc/init.d, create one, then add links in the relevant runlevel dirs.

The process is described at http://queens.db.toronto.edu/~nilesh/linux/subversion-howto/

The fastest way to get it going would be to add the startup command to /etc/rc.local/. This is run at the end of the system boot.

The "proper" way is to use the init system. There's a file called /etc/init.d/skeleton which is a basic framework for making an init script for starting a service. Copy it to /etc/init.d/svnserve and customise it as needed. There's also plenty of examples of svnserve init files on the web. Once /etc/init.d/svnserver [start|stop] works as expected, you can then run chkconfig svnserve on. This init script will be then be started on boot, and stopped on shutdown.