CentOS 5 :: Can't Find A Replacement For 'initlog'

Since trying to upgrade from Centos 4.7 to Centos 5.2, I've noticed the message about 'initlog' being deprecated. I run the following and get:

> /sbin/initlog -q -c "$HOME/my_xmlrpc_server"
WARNING: initlog is deprecated and will be removed in a future release

I'm now trying to find a suitable replacement for it and have not found one. We use 'initlog' to run a background service from my own init script to output any abnormal stdout and stderr messages to syslogs. I can't find any other program that will do a similar job. These stderr output are really handy for quickly diagnosing some of the more difficult problems.

Should I be trying to do this in a completely different way. Maybe the way I have created the init script should be done differently to not require initlog at all. Here is a snippet from my init script:

start)
getpid;
if [ -n "${PID:-}" ]; then
echo "$SERVER_NAME is already running on [$PID].";

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