Re: PostGreSQL upgrade failed (Debian Packages), need advice...

Eric D Nielsen <nielsene(at)MIT(dot)EDU> writes:
> There were two sets of errors. One set dealing with "FATAL 1: unsupported
> frontend protocol" during the data dumping stage of the automatic update
> script. It appears that the data was successfully dumped, however. Should I
> be worried? Is this FATAL warning actually routine?

It is if you are using a 7.4 or later client to talk to a 7.3 or older
server. The client will first attempt to connect with 7.4 protocol, and
only fall back to the older protocol when that fails. This leaves a
harmless gripe behind in the server's log...

> Dumping with new pg_dumpall
> FATAL 1: unsupported frontend protocol

... and evidently that's exactly what the script is doing. I'm not sure
why it's intermixing the server's log output with its own commentary
though.

> The second set of errors were caused by disappearance of the "debug-level"
> configuration parameter and by the upgrade script not over-writing the
> configuration file with a new one. (This is where the user-error claim is
> arising. I don't recall denying permission to overwrite, but the script is
> acting as if I did.)

Can't speak to this one. It could be a file-permissions kind of failure?

> In this case the initdb didn't clean up the partially populated PGDATA
> directory, should it have?

Depends how the script invoked initdb --- there's a command line option
telling it which to do.

> /usr/lib/postgresql/bin/initdb: line 648: /etc/postgresql/4122: Permission
> denied

> How do I proceed here? It looks like a permission issue, but there is no file
> by that name in that directory.

This seems to be related to Debian's local changes to Postgres; you'll
have to read their documentation to figure out what's up. Or at least
look at their version of the initdb script (in the stock 7.4 script,
line 648 is noticeably further down than you evidently got).

> Assuming that this issue is resolved and I can initdb and restart postmaster
> what is the series of actions to finish recovery?
> 1. psql template1 < db.out

Check.

> 2. adddepend? I'm coming from 7.2 to 7.4 so I beleive I'm supposed to run this,
> but I haven't found documentation on it yet...

Look at contrib/addepend/README (not sure where Debian puts this, but
it's there in the source tree).

regards, tom lane