Re: generating postgres core files on debian

On Thu, Sep 19, 2002 at 12:17:15PM +0100, Oliver Elphick wrote:
> On Thu, 2002-09-19 at 11:18, Louis-David Mitterrand wrote:
> >
> > I am trying to debug a problem involving DBD::PgSPI that crashes the
> > backend. It used to work fine util we installed perl-5.8. How can I get
> > a core file of a crashed backend on a debian-linux (unstable) machine?
> >
> > My /etc/security/limits.conf is empty. When I login as root "ulimit -c"
> > shows a limit of 0. If I set the limit to "unlimited" and logout/login
> > the limit is back to 0.
>
> I think /etc/security/limits.conf is used to limit what you can set with
> ulimit rather than dictate the settings.

Aha, that makes sense.

> You probably need to put "ulimit -c unlimited" in
> ~postgres/.bash_profile.

Hmm, I hadn't thought of that

> > Is it sufficient to set the proper limit and then restart postgres in
> > the same shell to obtain core files in case the backend crashes?
>
> Yes.
>
> The core file produced by postmaster from the binary package will not be
> very useful to you, because the binary is stripped. You need to build
> the package from source and use the binary from the source tree
> (.../src/backend/postmaster/postmaster), not the one copied into the
> package tree (.../debian/usr/lib/postgresql/bin/postmaster) since the
> stripping is done on the package tree after the binaries are installed
> there.

I also suspected that a stripped binary would not help much. Your
indications will save me much time.

> To build the package:
>
> cd /usr/local/src
> apt-get source postgresql # installs in postgresql-7.2.2
> apt-get build-dep postgresql # build dependencies
> apt-get install devscripts fakeroot # needed for building anything
> cd postgresql-7.2.2
> debuild

Hey, debuild is nice, didn't know about it until now. Cleaner
"dpkg-buidpackage -us -uc" or "fakeroot debian/rules binary" ;)

Thanks a lot for your help,

--
ldm(at)apartia(dot)org