Re: Postgres no longer starts

(Sorry if message threading is a bit off; I'm replying from a different
mail account as the previous post, so the "ref" header won't match.)

Well I tried

/usr/bin/pg_ctl -D /var/lib/pgsql/data start -l /tmp/pglogfile

and it just says

server starting

and then... nothing. It seems to quit immediately.

The logfile, /tmp/logfile exists, but is empty. (I noticed the previous
logfile, "pgstartup.log", was still the same and hadn't changed since a
few hours earlier, so the "modified" timestamp confirmed, so it wasn't
being updated any more.)

As where I did get the installer of Postgres for CentOS: I don't quite
remember the details, as it has been running well for several months.
But I got the idea from one of the many blog posts about it, such as
these:
http://blog.lystor.org.ua/2010/05/upgrading-postgresql-81-to-84-centos-55.html
http://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2010/howto-install-postgresql-8-4-database-server-on-centos-fedora-red-hat/

I think it just comes from one of the unofficial CentOS repositories.

Like I said, it has been running well for months and the latest upgrade
was unrelated to PostGres.

It may have been some manual tweak I did a few weeks ago... PostGres
hadn't been restarted since then.

If I knew what it was complaining about, I might be able to fix it.

I have already made a backup of the /var/lib/pgsql/data subdirectory, I
might just remove all of Postgres, and then reinstall.

Luckily this is a development machine, but as we don't know what causes
the problem we fear we might one day face the exact same problem where
it does matter: on a production machine. So we'd like to know exactly
what went wrong...

--
Bart Lateur
bart(dot)lateur(at)telenet(dot)be