Re: Can't restart Postgres

/usr/lib/postgresql/9.4/bin/pg_ctl: No such file or directory

postgres(at)pangaea:/usr/lib/postgresql/9.4/bin$ ls -al
total 4008
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 9 16:17 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Feb 9 16:17 ..
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 68128 Nov 16 06:53 clusterdb
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 68192 Nov 16 06:53 createdb
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 63920 Nov 16 06:53 createlang
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 72672 Nov 16 06:53 createuser
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 63936 Nov 16 06:53 dropdb
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 63920 Nov 16 06:53 droplang
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 63904 Nov 16 06:53 dropuser
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 68416 Nov 16 06:53 pg_basebackup
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 351904 Nov 16 06:53 pg_dump
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2186504 Nov 16 06:53 pg_dumpall
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 30992 Nov 16 06:53 pg_isready
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 47600 Nov 16 06:53 pg_receivexlog
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 51928 Nov 16 06:53 pg_recvlogical
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 154944 Nov 16 06:53 pg_restore
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 515320 Nov 16 06:53 psql
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 68160 Nov 16 06:53 reindexdb
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 72384 Nov 16 06:53 vacuumdb

As I mentioned, this Debian package removes pg_ctl from the bin directory and instead attempts to wrap the pg_ctl functionality in a perl script so that the PG process is integrated with systemd. I really wish they hadn’t, and it’s part of the reason I’m where I’m at.

-Shawn

> On Feb 15, 2017, at 8:49 AM, Joshua D. Drake <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> wrote:
>
> On 02/15/2017 08:35 AM, Shawn Thomas wrote:
>> Yes, that’s the correct sequence of scripts. And no there’s not anything really helpful in the system logs.
>>
>> I’m thinking that at this point I need to approach this problem as more of a disaster recovery. There was a full pg_dumpall file that was deleted and cannot be recovered so I need to recover the data from the /var/lib/postgresql/9.4/main directory. I believe this is called a file level recovery. I assume I need to use a fully functional, same version PG (on another machine?) to create a full dump of the data directory. Once I have this I can re-install Postgres on the initial server and read the databases back into it.
>>
>> Any advice on how to best go about this? The official documentation seems a bit thin:
>>
>> https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/backup-file.html
>>
>> I’ve only worked with normal (pg_dump, pg_dumpall) backups in the past.
>
> Shawn
>
> As the postgres user:
>
> /usr/lib/postgresql/9.4/bin/pg_ctl -D /var/lib/postgresql/9.4/main start
>
> What returns?
>
> Sincerely,
>
> JD
>
>
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