Ejabberd Daemon Setup on Debian Etch

I downloaded the ejabberd 2.1.4 binary from Process One and installed it to /etc/ejabberd on Debian Etch. Everything works great except I am having trouble getting the ejabberd service to automatically start as a daemon. I suspect I am making a silly mistake. The instructions seem simple enough:

On a *nix system, if you want ejabberd to be started as daemon at boot time, copy ejabberd.init from the ’bin’ directory to something like /etc/init.d/ejabberd (depending on your distribution). Create a system user called ejabberd; it will be used by the script to start the server. Then you can call /etc/inid.d/ejabberd start as root to start the server. (from http://www.process-one.net/en/ejabberd/guide_en#install.binary)

Here's what I did:
1) cp /etc/ejabberd/bin/ejabberd.init /etc/init.d/ejabberd (owner:group for this file is root:root)
2) addgroup ejabberd
2) adduser --system --ingroup ejabberd ejabberd (also tried default group “nogroup”)
3) chown -Rv ejabberd:ejabberd /etc/ejabberd (according to http://www.ejabberd.im/node/3625)
4) restart system

Following this, the daemon does not automatically start nor can I successfully execute the init script manually: /etc/init.d/ejabberd start

However, the following steps allow me to execute the init script successfully (but daemon service still fails to load after restart):

1) cp /etc/ejabberd/bin/ejabberd.init /etc/init.d/ejabberd (owner:group for this file is root:root)
2) adduser ejabberd (non-system user, password: ejabberd)
3) chown -Rv ejabberd:ejabberd /etc/ejabberd

Might somebody have an idea of what is causing the issue?