Re: production server down

On Sat, Dec 18, 2004 at 02:28:51PM -0800, Joe Conway wrote:

Hi,

> Apparently, either because of the server hang, or because of the flakey
> eth0 interface on reboot, pg_control had become "corrupt". However, it
> was not corrupt in the sense that it contained impossibly invalid data.
> In fact, as pointed out by Alvaro, it had values that all look close to
> those one would find in a recently initdb'd pg_control file, except the
> last modified date:

I can't help remembering the fact that the init script executes an
initdb automatically if it finds an empty data directory (the ones I
know of at least -- does the one you are running?). Maybe what happened
was that it found the empty mount point, executed an initdb, and then
the NFS drive came online. Later, the pg_control file was sync'ed to
the "empty database" settings. It'd be interesting to know if the
mount point does have some files on it.

These values (from the corrupt pg_control file) are strange:

> pg_control last modified: Tue Dec 14 15:39:26 2004
> Time of latest checkpoint: Tue Nov 2 17:05:32 2004

Maybe the latest checkpoint date has some interesting bit pattern that
could explain it somehow.

--
Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[(at)]dcc(dot)uchile(dot)cl>)
"El sentido de las cosas no viene de las cosas, sino de
las inteligencias que las aplican a sus problemas diarios
en busca del progreso." (Ernesto Hernández-Novich)