PostGreSQL blues

Originally posted by logic1
Is the postmaster running and what server are you attemtping to connect to? Give us your connect line, and what switches you're using.

psql -d -h -p -u??

.logic.

Dumb question ... really, really dumb .. but how do I check if the postmaster is running?

The server I'm attempting to connect to is on a lan, although for purposes of network traffic, everything is happening to the local host (since its all server-side stuff I need carried out) - if that answers the question about the server connection?

I'm just using the 'psql' command to connect, since that was what worked before I went away.

Originally posted by Typedef
guess

bash$ ps -A

As I said ... very very dumb question :rolleyes:

I assume that the postmaster actually appears as "postmaster" in the ps list ?

Originally posted by logic1
If the servers on a LAN then you need to use the psql -h <hostname/ip> to connect to it.

That's more than likely the prob.

.logic.

Sorry .logic, I should have made it a little clearer.

The server is on a LAN, but I'm telnetting into the server and trying to run the psql terminal client.

The other scenario is that apache (also on this machine) is trying to run a php script which access psql.

So for all intents and purposes the server is the localhost. If you follow me now?

Okkk ...

I /think/ I'm getting somewhere now.

I logged into the postgres superuser account (oddly enough called 'postgres') to run the command $->initdb -D /location/of/data

my question is this:

when I run this, I get the following message (which isn't too much of a worry in itself):

"This database system will be initialized with username "postgres".
This user will own all the data files and must also own the server process.

initdb: The directory /var/lib/pgsql/data exists but is not empty.
If you want to create a new database system, either remove or empty
the directory /var/lib/pgsql/data or run initdb with
an argument other than /var/lib/pgsql/data.
"


Now, the contents of the /data directory look something like this:

total 40
drwx

---

8 postgres postgres 4096 May 31 14:41 base/
drwx

---

2 postgres postgres 4096 May 31 14:41 globa/l
-rw

---

1 postgres postgres 7522 Apr 15 2002 pg_hba.conf
-rw

---

1 postgres postgres 1118 Oct 29 2001 pg_ident.conf
-rw

---

1 postgres postgres 4 Oct 29 2001 PG_VERSION
drwx

---

2 postgres postgres 4096 Jul 5 15:49 pg_xlog/
-rw

---

1 postgres postgres 3137 Oct 29 2001 postgresql.conf
-rw

---

1 postgres postgres 57 Aug 1 15:56 postmaster.opts
-rw

---

1 postgres postgres 45 Aug 1 15:56 postmaster.pid

and due to the amount of .conf files, I'm really thinking that deleting the contents of this directory would be a very bad idea.

On top of that, the "base" directory listed would appear to contain further subdirectories, all integer names, containing masses of files - all with integer names. I suspect that these are the actual user database files.

eg.

$-> ls /var/lib/pgsql/data/base -l
total 24
drwx

---

2 postgres postgres 4096 Nov 15 2001 1/
drwx

---

2 postgres postgres 4096 Aug 7 11:20 161490/
drwx

---

2 postgres postgres 4096 Oct 29 2001 18719/
drwx

---

2 postgres postgres 4096 Jul 2 17:11 18722/
drwx

---

2 postgres postgres 4096 Feb 5 2002 27111/
drwx

---

2 postgres postgres 4096 Jun 17 16:40 35141/


$-> ls /var/lib/pgsql/data/base/1 -l
total 1532
-rw

---

1 postgres postgres 0 Oct 29 2001 1215
-rw

---

1 postgres postgres 0 Oct 29 2001 1216
-rw

---

1 postgres postgres 8192 Oct 29 2001 1219
-rw

---

1 postgres postgres 16384 Oct 29 2001 1247
-rw

---

1 postgres postgres 65536 Oct 29 2001 1249

.........

-rw

---

1 postgres postgres 8192 Oct 29 2001 17276
-rw

---

1 postgres postgres 16384 Oct 29 2001 17288
-rw

---

1 postgres postgres 1904 Nov 15 2001 pg_internal.init
-rw

---

1 postgres postgres 4 Oct 29 2001 PG_VERSION


Now, does anyone have any idea/experience with postgresql as to which of these locations data was previously written to? Or am I barking up the wrong tree in my attempts to get this working again.

Cheers for all the advice type and .logic

Got the service back up a little while ago.

had to delete the postmaster.pid from the /data directory (since icprm didn't seem to do the job) and then restarted the postmaster service from the postgres superuser account.