Re: Initdb failing for no apparent reason in 8.0.0beta4 on windows

Nevermind, I found out what this was. Turned out that the customer
machine in question had particularly heavy security settings and so the
enetaware account did not have permission to write into the directory
where it was trying to create PGDATA. Once I widened the settings on the
parent directory then it worked fine. Kind of odd that inidb.exe just
fails silently when this is the case however.

> Hello,
>
> We have been using postgres 8.0.0beta4 successfully on various windows
> machines for a while now, but we have run across a particular windows
> machine of one of our customers where initdb.exe is failing with an exit
> code of 1 for no reason that I can determine. The machine is running
> windows 2000 (sp4, version 5.00.2195). I have tested in-house
> successfully on windows 2k (sp4, v5.00.2195 as well), windows 2k3, and
> windows xp pro (sp2).
>
> We created a non-administrator account (named "enetaware") on the
> customer machine and given it "log-on-as-service" privileges (we
> ultimately run postgres as a service using this account). We have the
> postgresql bin, lib, and share directories installed on the customer
> machine in
> "C:\Program Files\EmprisaNetworks\E-NetAware\postgresql". We execute
> the following command while logged in using this account (-d and -n
> options added temporarily for debugging):
>
> initdb.exe -d -n -U ena -L "C:\Program
> Files\EmprisaNetworks\E-NetAware\postgresql\share" --locale=C
>
> The output from this command is:
>
> Running in noclean mode. Mistakes will not be cleaned up.
> Running in debug mode.
> VERSION=8.0.0beta4
> PGDATA=C:/E-NetAware-Data/db
> share_path=C:/Program Files/EmprisaNetworks/E-NetAware/postgresql/share
> PGPATH=C:/Program Files/EmprisaNetworks/E-NetAware/postgresql/bin
> POSTGRES_SUPERUSERNAME=ena
> POSTGRES_BKI=C:/Program
> Files/EmprisaNetworks/E-NetAware/postgresql/share/postgr
> es.bki
> POSTGRES_DESCR=C:/Program
> Files/EmprisaNetworks/E-NetAware/postgresql/share/post
> gres.description
> POSTGRESQL_CONF_SAMPLE=C:/Program
> Files/EmprisaNetworks/E-NetAware/postgresql/sh
> are/postgresql.conf.sample
> PG_HBA_SAMPLE=C:/Program
> Files/EmprisaNetworks/E-NetAware/postgresql/share/pg_hb
> a.conf.sample
> PG_IDENT_SAMPLE=C:/Program
> Files/EmprisaNetworks/E-NetAware/postgresql/share/pg_
> ident.conf.sample
> The files belonging to this database system will be owned by user "ena".
> This user must also own the server process.
>
> The database cluster will be initialized with locale C.
>
> creating directory C:/E-NetAware-Data/db ... initdb: failed
>
> The exit code returned by initdb is "1". Any ideas why this would be
> failing? I didn't see any similar report about this in the mailing list
> archives. My next step is to recompile initdb.exe and put in more
> temporary debug print statements and have the customer retry it, however
> that may take a while.
>
> Thanks in advance.
> Steve McWilliams

Steve McWilliams
Software Engineer
Emprisa Networks
703-691-0433x21
smcwilliams(at)emprisanetworks(dot)com

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