Re: pg on Debian servers

On Sat, Nov 11, 2017 at 01:03:18PM +0000, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:

> Several legacy programs written in Delphi ground to a halt this morning,
> which turned out to be because a Debian system had updated its copy of
> PostgreSQL and restarted the server, which broke any live connections.
>
> At least some versions of Delphi, not to mention other IDE/RAD tools with
> database-aware components, don't automatically try to reestablish a database
> session that's been interrupted. In any event, an unexpected server restart
> (irrespective of all investment in UPSes etc.) has the potential of playing
> havoc on a clustered system.
>
> Is there any way that either the package maintainer or a site
> administrator/programmer such as myself can mark the Postgres server
> packages as "manual upgrade only" or similar? Or since I'm almost certainly
> not the first person to be bitten by this, is there a preferred hack in
> mitigation?

Apart from that (putting packages on hold), PostgreSQL
updates on Debian don't upgrade existing clusters
automatically. They do create a new cluster but the old one
is kept around and stays running, IIRC even on the very same
port.

(Having gone all the way from PG 7.1 to PG 10 on Debian :)

What did

pg_lsclusters

say ?

There must have been something additional at play.

Regards,
Karsten
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