Re: PITR - warm standby switchover question

Excellent! Thanks. One other quick question... What would happen if I
didn't delete the recovery.conf file? Is that step just to prevent
accidentally restarting the server with it there?

On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 6:26 PM, Erik Jones <ejones(at)engineyard(dot)com> wrote:

>
> On Apr 14, 2009, at 3:47 PM, Dan Hayes wrote:
>
> I've followed the implementation instructions at 24.4.2:
>> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/warm-standby.html
>>
>> And I've used the archive/restore commands from the example in F23.2:
>> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/pgstandby.html
>>
>> This all works great. The primary backs up the WAL archives to a mutually
>> accessible folder and the backup system is continuously reading in the logs.
>> Monitoring the "standby.log" file shows that the system is working as it
>> should.
>>
>> My question is, if the main system goes down, what do I do to the backup
>> machine to make it come alive? Currently, when I attempt to login to the
>> database, I get the error: "psql: FATAL: the database is starting up" I'm
>> assuming this means it can't be accessed while its in continuous recovery
>> mode. I attempted to turn off postgresql on the main server and try
>> connecting again, same error (was obvious, but I do things one step at a
>> time...) So then I removed the "recovery.conf" file on the backup server
>> and attempted to restart postgresql. It stopped fine, but the restart
>> failed.
>>
>> The pg_log/postgresql-XXXX-XX-XX.log file says:
>> LOG: database system was interrupted while in recovery at log time
>> 2009-04-14 17:36:14 CDT
>> HINT: If this has occurred more than once some data might be corrupted
>> and you might need to choose an earlier recovery target.
>> LOG: could not open file "pg_xlog/0000000100000002000000DD" (log file 2,
>> segment 221): No such file or directory
>> LOG: invalid primary checkpoint record
>> LOG: could not open file "pg_xlog/0000000100000002000000DC" (log file 2,
>> segment 220): No such file or directory
>> LOG: invalid secondary checkpoint record
>> PANIC: could not locate a valid checkpoint record
>> LOG: startup process (PID 3756) was terminated by signal 6: Aborted
>> LOG: aborting startup due to startup process failure
>>
>> Any ideas what I'm doing wrong? How do I bring the standby server out of
>> standby do act as the primary?
>>
>
> You should use pg_standby's -t flag to specify a stop file. Then all you
> need to do is touch (create) that file and pg_standby will let the server
> come out of recovery mode into normal operation mode. Be sure to rm or mv
> the recovery.conf once that is complete.
>
> Erik Jones, Database Administrator
> Engine Yard
> Support, Scalability, Reliability
> 866.518.9273 x 260
> Location: US/Pacific
> IRC: mage2k
>
>
>
>
>
>