Re: corruption bug in 7.2.3-RH

On Fri, 7 Feb 2003, Jonathan Ellis wrote:

> when trying to vacuum I got this:
>
> FATAL 2: PageIndexTupleDelete: corrupted page pointers: lower = 21845,
> upper = 21845, special = 21845
>
> I experimentally determined the problem was with my "users" table. I
> did a pg_dump -t on it, manually deleted all triggers, dropped the
> table, and loaded from the dump. This fixed it. (Merely deleting all
> rows from the table & re-copying did not.) For future reference, is
> there an easier fix? Is this fixed in 7.3.2?

IMMEDIATELY DO THE FOLLOWING:

Check for bad ram and bad blocks on your hard drives.

Most corruption problems in postgresql servers are caused by either one or
a combination of both of those problems. memtest86 is good for memory on
x86 boxes, not sure what OS you're running, but some kind of bad block
checker should be run against the drives as well.

Your first reaction on such failures should be to immediate verify the
solidity of the server postgresql is sitting on. It's a good database,
but it can't overcome flawed hardware.

If your server has no problems, then backup and upgrade to 7.2.4 since
there are some bug fixes for minor duplicate key issues in vacuum tables
and such. 7.3 seems real stable, but it's just different enough for us to
have to plan the rollout where I work, since just tossing it online might
break some poorly written apps we have... :-)