Re: unable to fail over to warm standby server

On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 11:49 PM, Mason Hale <mason(at)onespot(dot)com> wrote:
> While I did not remove the trigger file, I did rename recovery.conf to
> recovery.conf.old.
> That file contained the recovery_command configuration that identified the
> trigger file. So that rename should have eliminated the problem. But it
> didn't. Even after making this change and taking the trigger file out of the
> equation my database failed to come online.

Renaming of the recovery.conf doesn't resolve the problem at all. Instead,
the sysadmin had to remove only the trigger file with a wrong permission
and just restart postgres.

>> 9.) The server did not come up (again). This time the contents of the
>> new postgresql.log file were:
>>
>> [postgres(at)prod-db-2 pg_log]$ tail -n 100 postgresql-2010-01-18_211132.log
>> 2010-01-18 21:11:32 UTC ()LOG: database system was interrupted while in recovery at log time 2010-01-18 20:10:59 UTC
>> 2010-01-18 21:11:32 UTC ()HINT: If this has occurred more than once some data might be corrupted and you might need to choose an earlier recovery target.
>> 2010-01-18 21:11:32 UTC ()LOG: could not open file "pg_xlog/0000000200003C82000000A3" (log file 15490, segment 163): No such file or directory
>> 2010-01-18 21:11:32 UTC ()LOG: invalid primary checkpoint record
>> 2010-01-18 21:11:32 UTC ()LOG: could not open file "pg_xlog/0000000200003C8200000049" (log file 15490, segment 73): No such file or directory
>> 2010-01-18 21:11:32 UTC ()LOG: invalid secondary checkpoint record
>> 2010-01-18 21:11:32 UTC ()PANIC: could not locate a valid checkpoint record
>> 2010-01-18 21:11:32 UTC ()LOG: startup process (PID 9328) was terminated by signal 6: Aborted
>> 2010-01-18 21:11:32 UTC ()LOG: aborting startup due to startup process failure

You seem to focus on the above trouble. I think that this happened because
recovery.conf was deleted and restore_command was not given. In fact, the
WAL file (e.g., pg_xlog/0000000200003C82000000A3) required for recovery
was unable to be restored from the archive because restore_command was
not supplied. Then recovery failed.

If the sysadmin had left the recovery.conf and removed the trigger file,
pg_standby in restore_command would have restored all WAL files required
for recovery, and recovery would advance well.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

--
Fujii Masao
NIPPON TELEGRAPH AND TELEPHONE CORPORATION
NTT Open Source Software Center