It's a daemon, root can run it, you can fire it up at run time,by adding it to rc.d.
Since root ran it you can store the DB settings in a file only root can access (you can use another user, it doesn't have to be root).

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Right... but how do you prevent any script on the system from asking for the DB settings?
                - Ant

This is where we came in, isn't it?

How's about having a db table of all the permitted scripts and methods to retrieve this data and amend it?

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Brother Frankus.