Re: Postgres WAL Recovery Fails... And Then Works...

Sorry, Initial response got blocked since I replied with the logs quoted
again.

>
> Also, which version of postgres are you using?

PostgreSQL 9.2.1 on Ubuntu 12.04

>
>
> Except in my case no number of restarts helped. You didn't say, were
> you explicitly copying $PGDATA or using some other mechanism to
> migrate the data elsewhere?

So we have a very large database (~5TB), so we use a script to do
parallel rsyncs to copy the data directory
(https://gist.github.com/4477190/#file-pmrcp-rb) The whole copy process
ended up taking ~3.5 hours. So we did a physical copy of $PGDATA (which
is located at /var/lib/postgresql/9.2/main/ on both machines.). We
followed the following process to do this:

1. Master archives WAL files to Backup Host.
2. Execute on Master: psql -c "select pg_start_backup('DATE-slave-restore')"
3. Execute on Master: RCP='rsync -cav --inplace -e rsh'
EXCLUDE='pg_xlog' pmrcp /var/lib/postgresql/9.2/main/
prd-db-01:/var/lib/postgresql/9.2/main/ > /tmp/backup.log
4. Execute on Master: psql -c "select pg_stop_backup()"
5. On Slave, setup recovery.conf to read WAL archive on Backup Host
6. Execute on Slave: pg_ctlcluster 9.2 main start (as described in
initial email)

Best,
Phil