Need better progress feedback during startup sequence

When first launching the server, it's hard to tell when startup is
complete. There are lots of pauses, and it's not clear whether there
will eventually be a "successful startup" message. This adds a bit of
uncertainty/confusion as you sit there and wonder whether it's done,
still going or broken. (It would actually be quite cool/unique to add
some sort of ascii progress bar like sftp and scp use.)