Re: Permission denied error for initdb

Yeah, it's 9.3.15, its the required version for the main software I want to
use, but I can try a later version if this doesn't end up working.

For some reason I can't find sysctl ANYWHERE on this system, but just
looking at the values in /proc/sys/kernel I get:

shmmni: 4096
shmmax: 18446744073692774399
shmall: 18446744073692774399

I'm guessing it might be odd that shmmax and shmall are the same size?

On Thu, Nov 24, 2016 at 12:58 AM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> Tom Dron <thomas(dot)e(dot)dron(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> > fbbgsa(at)web1:~/.local$ initdb -D ~/.local/data
> > ...
> > creating template1 database in /home/.local/data/base/1 ... FATAL:
> > shmat(id=18808835) failed: Permission denied
>
> That's really weird. Usually problems appear at the preceding shmget
> call, not shmat. I'd guess that somehow the System V shared memory
> facility is turned off on that machine, but surely it'd fail at shmget
> if so. Still, it might be informative to do "sysctl -a | grep shm"
> and see what the shmmax/shmall/shmmni parameters are set to.
>
> Also, I gather from the printout that this isn't a terribly late-model
> Postgres. If you could try 9.4 or later, that might conceivably have
> better luck because it requires only a very small SysV segment.
> (This error doesn't sound like it's dependent on segment size, but
> I'm grasping at straws...)
>
> regards, tom lane
>