Re: First Time Starting Up PostgreSQL and Having Problems

Brent Bates <BBates(at)langleyfcu(dot)org> writes:
> This is a first time install of PostgreSQL version 11.3 on a CentOS server running release 7.6.1810. I've just finished setting up the postgresql.conf and pg_hba.conf files and am trying to start up PostgreSQL for the first time. I'm getting errors no matter what I try. My first attempt resulted in errors that look like the following:

> syntax error in file "/var/lib/pgsql/11/data/pg_hba.conf" line 84, near token "all"

Hm ... could we see exactly what you have in pg_hba.conf?

> I received this error for every configuration line that wasn't a comment. The "all" is in the USER column. No matter what I put in the USER column, I get the same error, but listing whatever string is in that column. I wandered if this error was just a result of a different error someplace else, so I commented out all lines in this file. That resulted in the following error:
> FATAL: exceeded maxAllocatedDescs (16) while trying to open file "/var/lib/pgsql/11/data/pg_hba.conf"

That's just weird. Zero entries in pg_hba.conf isn't a useful situation
(since the postmaster wouldn't allow any connections), but if I try it
I get a failure like this:

2019-06-19 15:43:24.257 EDT [20959] LOG: starting PostgreSQL 12beta2 on x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, compiled by gcc (GCC) 4.4.7 20120313 (Red Hat 4.4.7-23), 64-bit
2019-06-19 15:43:24.281 EDT [20959] LOG: listening on IPv4 address "0.0.0.0", port 5440
2019-06-19 15:43:24.281 EDT [20959] LOG: listening on IPv6 address "::", port 5440
2019-06-19 15:43:24.282 EDT [20959] LOG: listening on Unix socket "/tmp/.s.PGSQL.5440"
2019-06-19 15:43:24.303 EDT [20959] LOG: configuration file "/home/postgres/testversion/data/pg_hba.conf" contains no entries
2019-06-19 15:43:24.303 EDT [20959] FATAL: could not load pg_hba.conf
2019-06-19 15:43:24.305 EDT [20959] LOG: database system is shut down

Reading between the lines suggests that something might be trying to
recursively read pg_hba.conf if it's empty, but it's hard to say what that
something could be. Are you sure this is a stock build of Postgres?
Where did you get it from?

Another question is what non-default (not-commented) entries you have in
postgresql.conf. One idea that came to me while thinking about the syntax
error is that maybe you have one of the other configuration-file-name
variables pointing to pg_hba.conf. That error message tells us that the
server is trying to read pg_hba.conf, right enough, but it doesn't
actually say what it's expecting to find in that file ...

regards, tom lane