Re: problem with maintenance script and missing pg_clog

On Wed, 2002-09-25 at 11:18, Ben Roberts wrote:
> As you can see postmaster looks for the value of POSTGRES_HOME directory in
> /etc/passwd and if not found it defaults to the value of
> /var/lib/postgres. Unfortunately the relevant entry in /etc/passwd is:
>
> postgres:x:31:32:postgres:/var/lib/postgres:/bin/sh
>
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> Instead of /2/var/lib/postgres.
>
> ho hum....we seem to have forgotten to change the postgres home directory
> when we made the move to the new disk. Possibly postgres is using the value
> of POSTGRES_HOME for some things and POSTGRES_DATA for others, causing the
> problems we are seeing?
>
> It's not 100% certain that this is the cause of the problem, but it looks
> very much like the smoking gun to me.
>
> Or is just 'OK' to have separate directories for POSTGRES_HOME and
> POSTGRES_DATA?

Yes.

As delivered, the package (postgresql-client, on which postgresql
depends) installs /etc/postgresql/postgresql.env and sources that in the
startup script for postgres (one of ~postgres/.profile,
~postgres/.bash_profile, ~postgres/.login). postgresql.env is used to
set up the environment for anyone using psql as well as for postgres.
It says:

[ -r /etc/postgresql/postmaster.conf ] &&
. /etc/postgresql/postmaster.conf

PGDATA=${POSTGRES_DATA:-/var/lib/postgres/data}
...

POSTGRES_HOME is in fact only used by the install scripts and as the
directory to cd to before running pg_ctl to start the postmaster. So
unless you have something in ~postgres/ that is giving PGDATA a
different value, I can't see any problem here. Even if that were the
case, the postmaster would be started with one value or the other; I
don't see how it could use both at once.

--
Oliver Elphick Oliver(dot)Elphick(at)lfix(dot)co(dot)uk
Isle of Wight, UK
http://www.lfix.co.uk/oliver
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