Re: initdb fails quietly

"Michael Muratet US-Huntsville" <Michael(dot)Muratet(at)operon(dot)com> writes:
> I installed postgressql from RH a4_64 rpms. I created a user postgres =
> (non-system UID) and tried to run initdb getting:

> creating template1 database in /data1/postgres_data/base/1 ... child =
> process exited with exit code 1
> initdb: removing contents of data directory "/data1/postgres_data"

Do you have SELinux turned on? Some of the earlier RHEL4 releases had
selinux rules that prevented /usr/bin/postgres from writing /dev/tty,
which is a reasonable rule for a daemon process but served to prevent
any error messages from appearing in interactive use :-(. To get around
that you can either temporarily disable selinux, or update to a more
recent set of selinux policy rules.

As for the failure that it's not able to tell you about, that's probably
selinux as well. I believe the standard policy constrains postgres to
write only under /var/lib/pgsql, which means you *must* put the database
in the default place, unless you want to modify the policy.

You could check in /var/log/messages for "avc denied" messages to
confirm these theories...

regards, tom lane