Managing C nodes from an Erlang application

[Massimo Cesaro]

In our Erlang application (built following the Design Principles
guidelines) we have a mix of Erlang modules and nodes and C nodes.
While it is simple to put under a supervision tree the Erlang parts, it
is not clear to me how to start and stop C nodes from the application.
Currently we just assume that the nodes are running and in the correct
state at application boot, and we do this starting as daemons (we're
under Linux) the C nodes using shell scripts. What we'd like to have is
a common management both for Erlang and C nodes, like having the Pid of
Cnodes, using whereis() for checking if the Cnode is registered, etc.
Any suggestion on how to replace this shell script driven management of
C node with something more robust and predictable ?
Regards,
Massimo Cesaro