I have a program which is going to be running on an SBC running redhat. One of the requirements for the program is that it if the SBC gets powered down or rebooted that our program starts running when it's restarted. This can't require a user to log in first, it must reboot and start running again without any user interaction.

On our temporary version I've created this is done by having a guest account automatically log in at bootup. Do i need to do this? I think it's possible to have a program at bootup without any user login, but I'm not cretin what runs at bootup and what runs at login. Can anyone confirm if this can be done and point me in the correct direction?

you can use
/etc/rc.local
or the equivalent in redhat

Is this a GUI program?

On windows - you can run it as a deamon service ... There must be an equivalent of it in Linux too ...

linux

You can use cron
You can even specify the user

thank you for the answers, I figured it would be something simple like knowing which file to add it too. I'll try this later today.