Re: Problems with starting Postgres

Alessio Bragadini <alessio(at)albourne(dot)com> writes:
> The problem is an unexpected crash/reboot of the machine (which
> shouldn't happen, but...) that leaves socket files in /tmp and requires
> manual tweaking after the machine is up again. Maybe it's our
> installation, but we need a more reliable pg_ctl

A lot of people (including me) set up their boot-time script to
unconditionally delete /tmp/.s.PGSQL.5432 before launching the new
postmaster. Of course this is pretty dangerous if you are in the
habit of using the same script for hand restarts, since you might
zap a socket belonging to a live postmaster.

With any luck the problem will go away in 7.1 --- it has what I hope
will prove to be a more robust scheme for deleting old socket files
than the current one.

regards, tom lane