Re: Unhelpful initdb error message

On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 19:03, Thom Brown <thom(at)linux(dot)com> wrote:
> On 6 March 2012 18:01, Adrian Klaver <adrian(dot)klaver(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> On Tuesday, March 06, 2012 9:53:52 am Tom Lane wrote:
>>> Thom Brown <thom(at)linux(dot)com> writes:
>>> > /home/thom/Development/data was causing problems so:
>>> >
>>> > mv data databroken
>>> > mkdir data
>>> > initdb
>>> >
>>> > ... working fine again.  I then used the postmaster.pid from this when
>>> > started up.  But if I do:
>>> >
>>> > pg_ctl stop
>>> > rm -rf data
>>> > mv databroken data
>>> > initdb
>>> >
>>> > ... error messages appear again.
>>>
>>> Okay, so the question becomes: what is different between databroken and
>>> a freshly mkdir'd empty directory?  If there is no visible difference in
>>> contents, ownership, or permissions, then it seems like this is evidence
>>> of a filesystem bug (ie, apparently empty directory acts nonempty for
>>> some operations).
>>
>> A thought, what if you do rm -rf * in the data directory?
>
> I've done that a couple times, but no effect.  I think Tom's point
> about a filesystem bug is probably right.

You mentioned encryptfs, right? That's where I'd be looking first :-O

it wasn't obvious enough to throw something in your kernel dmesg log
by any chance? :-)

--
 Magnus Hagander
 Me: http://www.hagander.net/
 Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/