Re: initdb failure on RH 5.10

BRUSSER Michael <Michael(dot)BRUSSER(at)3ds(dot)com> writes:
> initdb failed
> FATAL: unexpected data beyond EOF in block 19 of relation base/1/2609
> HINT: This has been seen to occur with buggy kernels; consider updating your system.
> STATEMENT: COMMENT ON FUNCTION euc_jis_2004_to_shift_jis_2004
> (INTEGER, INTEGER, CSTRING, INTERNAL, INTEGER)
> IS 'internal conversion function for EUC_JIS_2004 to SHIFT_JIS_2004';

That's ... surprising. We've only ever seen that error message in cases
with heavy concurrent updates and wonky underlying storage; initdb is not
where anyone would expect it.

> initdb is called like this:
> initdb -D <data-dir> -L <input-dir> -E UTF8 --locale=C

It's not exactly customary to use -L in initdb calls. Is it possible
you're pointing it to an incompatible library directory? Not that I see
how that would lead to this behavior, but you're definitely dealing with
something pretty weird.

> This is Postgres 8.4.4, the installation piece has been stable and always worked, but this time they have a new Red Hat 5.10 server

What in the world are they doing using 8.4.4? The entire 8.4.x release
series is out of support anyway, but there is little if any excuse not
to be using the last minor release, 8.4.22.

I'd call your attention also to the fact that RHEL 5.10 is obsolete.
5.11 came out last month, and Red Hat are not known for updating back-rev
release series with inessential bug fixes.

If you can still reproduce this with 5.11 and 8.4.22, people might be
interested in looking more closely. Otherwise, well, you're dealing
with five-year-old software with a very long list of known bugs.

regards, tom lane