Re: Problems restarting after database crashed (signal 11).

At Thu, 01 Jul 04, Unidentified Flying Banana Tom Lane, said:
> Christopher Cashell <topher-pgsql(at)zyp(dot)org> writes:
> > Either way, I think you're right, and I think that is what happened
> > here.
>
> So did it come up after you rebooted? The other guy wasn't having
> any luck that way :-(

Yep. ;-)

In a testament to PostgreSQL's robustness, after rebooting the machine,
things went mostly[1] well. Postgres started up without issue, programs
made their connections to the database, and queries were happily made.

Everything looks to be working perfectly now.

And luckily, this machine, though it holds critical data, isn't a
time/immediate access critical machine. So having it down for a few
hours wasn't any kind of a problem, other than for my blood pressure.

Thank you Tom, and the rest of you, for your help. It's greatly
appreciated.

> regards, tom lane

[1] Upon rebooting, the autovacuum utility kind of harfed. Here is
the log entries that it made:

---
[2004-06-30 08:44:53 AM] Failed connection to database template1
with error: FATAL: the database system is starting up
.
[2004-06-30 08:44:53 AM] Failed connection to database template1
with error: FATAL: the database system is starting up
.
[2004-06-30 08:44:53 AM] Error: Cannot connect to template1,
exiting.
---

When I first saw this, the problem seemed to still be there, and I
saw "FATAL: the database system is starting up" running across my
brain in bright red letters.

I took a minute to breath, and luckily realized that at least one
program (that starts automatically upon reboot) seemed to be
accessing the database just fine. At that, I felt a little hope
return.

So, I shut down Postgres, then restarted Postgres, then restarted
the autovacuum utility, and everything worked just peachy. I'm
guessing that perhaps the autovacuum tool was trying to connect to
Postgres while it was replaying the transaction log from not
having been shut down cleanly, and that's why it choked, but I
don't know that for sure.

--
| Christopher
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| Here I stand. I can do no other. |
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