Re: Postgresql didn't start after power failure

On Wednesday January 12 2005 1:08, Clodoaldo Pinto wrote:
> There was a power failure and then the postgresql service didn't start on
> system restart:
>
> The last activity before power failure was a vacuum full and after that
> nothing at all for more than one hour.
> Is there anyway to know why did it not start and prevent it to happen
> again? How to configure it to write a log at system boot?

PostgreSQL has a safety check that prevents it from restarting if it thinks
there may be residual shared memory segments that might cause a problem.
Your server log will tell you how to check (see ipcs).

It is rare in my experience that failed restarts due to the safety check are
valid. You can usually just nuke the pid file and restart after checking
the shmmem segment listings. I believe Tom Lane recently made the safety
check in 8.0 is a lot smarter than prior versions. I vaguely recall he
posted the patch a month or three ago...

Ed