Re: Postgres 10.7 Systemd Startup Issue

On Thu, Jun 6, 2019 at 6:57 PM Kelly, Kevin <Kevin(dot)Kelly(at)sig(dot)com> wrote:
> We’re attempting to launch postgres via systemd and noticing that when invoking via systemctl start postgres.service the prompt never returns. If we switch to another tty and check the status it shows as:
> Active: activating (start) since Thu 2019-06-06 09:36:32 EDT; 12min ago
> If we change the type from notify to forking we see the same behavior. The instance seems to be up and running just fine, we just never see the active (running) status as we have come to expect.

Are you sure you have the postgres.service correctly configured? ( or
you could post the ExecStart/Type config, or the whole service file ).

The type tells systemd how to know the service has finished starting
and is running, notify means it does systemd integration via socket,
with IIRC postgres does not. Forking means the usual server approach,
server detachs and after ExecStart returns it is considered running.
Simple is for not detaching.

Your symptom seem to be caused by either using a execstart command
which does not detach ( so forking waits forever for initialisation to
finish ) or for not having done daemon-reload to systemd ( so you are
still in notify mode and it is waiting forever for postgres to tell
him it is ready ).

> We’re running on top of a stock SLES12 SP3. Could someone assist in tracking down why this service isn’t transitioning to the active state?

Try posting some log, the service file ( to know which command you use
), maybe a ps trace, but I would go for checking the two problems
above first. My bet is on the second one ( and if it is that you'll
have the surprise of it working after machine reboot ).

Bear in mind many of us, althoguh wanting to help, do not even know
what "stock SLES12 SP3" is, so no idea on systemd version and/or
service files content.

Francisco Olarte.