Re: [GENERAL] Re: [GENERAL] ERROR: XX001: could not read block 2354 of relation…

Believe it or not, this morning I found that the IT departement has
installed "Trend Micro Office Scan" on the server. I will contact them to
remove it. Do I still need to dump everything thing and load back or this
will solve the problem? If I need to dump, what type of dump do you
recommend?

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 8:52 PM, Craig Ringer
<craig(at)postnewspapers(dot)com(dot)au>wrote:

> Patrick Desjardins wrote:
>
>> I am on Windows Server 2003 and humm I will have to check tommorow morning
>> but I do not think any Anti-Virus is scanning.
>>
>
> Sometimes even an antivirus package that has its "realtime protection"
> features disabled will still cause problems. This comes back to what Scott
> Marlowe said: "A lot of anti-virus packages are dumb as a brick." They often
> fail to unload hook DLLs when resident protection is disabled, and sometimes
> even keep on scanning, just ignoring the results! (I've seen this multiple
> times).
>
> I remain of the opinion that antivirus software has no place on a database
> server. There should be no way a virus can get near it, because you're NEVER
> granting users access to it except via the database engine, and the only
> hole in the Windows Firewall should be for the database.
>
> Since this issue keeps on cropping up, I wonder how the other DB vendors
> that support Windows handle it? Do antivirus products have standard APIs for
> exceptions - "don't scan me" ? If so, isn't that a gaping security hole? And
> if not, how do other DBs manage to get anything done when some half-wit
> dodgy AV software is installed? Or do the other folks (Oracle etc) just have
> these sorts of issues too?
>
> Proposed FAQ entry:
>
> ---------------------
> Q: I'm getting weird, intermittent errors when starting PostgreSQL or
> executing SQL statements. My PostgreSQL server runs on Windows.
>
> A(1): If you are running a version of PostgreSQL less than 8.3, upgrade.
> Remember to dump your database (you can use PgAdmin for this) BEFORE
> uninstalling the old version of PostgreSQL.
>
> A(2): If you have any antivirus software installed, COMPLETELY UNINSTALL it
> (at least as a test to see if it is the problem). Many anti-virus packages
> are written without considering the needs of databases, and do things that
> will interfere with the way a database accesses its files. Some have
> implementation problems that mean that even disabling their real-time
> protection is insufficient, since they STILL interfere with the database
> even when supposedly disabled. Lots of AV packages also cause severe
> performance problems with a database even when they appear to work fine. To
> see if your antivirus software is causing your problems, completely
> uninstall it and reboot your computer before re-testing.
>
> Q: I'm getting inexplicable network connection errors or network
> performance problems with PostgreSQL. My PostgreSQL server runs on Windows.
>
> A(1): If you are running a version of PostgreSQL less than 8.3, upgrade.
> Remember to dump your database (you can use PgAdmin for this) BEFORE
> uninstalling the old version of PostgreSQL.
>
> A(2): If you have any 3rd party firewall software installed, COMPLETELY
> UNINSTALL it. Disabling it is not good enough, as many firewall packages
> continue to interfere with Windows' networking even when disabled. 3rd party
> firewall packages should not be necessary on any version of Windows with a
> built-in firewall, and tend to cause more problems than they solve. They are
> unsuitable for use on a machine intended for server use. <b>If, after
> uninstalling your firewall, you lose your network connection or have other
> networking problems</b>, run the following command:
> netsh ip interface reset %HOMEPATH%\Desktop\resetlog.txt
> which should clean up any mess left by the poorly written firewall
> package's failure to cleanly uninstall its self.
>
>
>
> [Needs link to section in server admin docs "PostgreSQL Server
> Administration for Windows" that discusses AV scanning, isolated server,
> firewall, datadir location, permissions, etc - I'm happy to write at least a
> basic version of this if folks here agree it'd be useful.]
> ---------------------
>
>
>
> --
> Craig Ringer
>