Re: postgres 9.0 - unable to bind to localhost.

Sorry for a late reply, but I had the exact same problem and it was a bug
in the Red Hat RPM package upgrade script of the sudo package. This
basically means the user running Postgres cannot resolve hostname
localhost. Have you tried logging in as the user running Postgres and
trying to resolve localhost? In RHEL/Centos you would do this with:

*su - postgres*
*nslookup localhost*

If this returns 127.0.0.1, then something else is a problem, but if it says
the hostname cannot be resolved, then you need to check permissions of
/etc/hosts and /etc/nsswitch.conf, all users should be able to read those
two files. You can just run:

*chmod a+r /etc/hosts*
*chmod a+r /etc/nsswitch.conf*

Another workaround would be to replace 'localhost' in postgresql.conf with
'127.0.0.1'.

Regards,
Strahinja

On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 9:57 AM, Rajagopalan, Jayashree <
Jayashree(dot)Rajagopalan(at)emc(dot)com> wrote:

> Hi all:****
>
> ** **
>
> Getting this error in the postgres logs:****
>
> 2012-11-29 09:47:39.335 CST - SessionId:50b7839b.4791 - TransId:0 - LOG:
> could not translate host name "localhost", service "5435" to address: Name
> or service not known****
>
> 2012-11-29 09:47:39.336 CST - SessionId:50b7839b.4791 - TransId:0 -
> WARNING: could not create listen socket for "localhost"****
>
> 2012-11-29 09:47:39.343 CST - SessionId:50b7839b.4791 - TransId:0 - LOG:
> could not resolve "localhost": Name or service not known****
>
> ** **
>
> Also the netstat command reveals the port(5435) is not bound to 127.0.0.1.
> Checked the pg_hba.conf, /etc/hosts, nsswitch.conf, resolv.conf do not see
> any issues there.****
>
> ** **
>
> the listen_addresses entry is like this:
>
> listen_addresses = 'localhost,<host_ip>'
>
> The port is bound to the <host_ip> but not to localhost.
>
> How does postgres resolve the local host?
>
> The entry is proper for localhost in /etc/hosts, and nsswitch.conf points
> hosts to files, dns.
>
> "host localhost" resolves to 127.0.0.1 in command line.
>
> what else to check?****
>
> ** **
>
> Regards****
>
> J****
>