Greetings!
In an attempt to satisfy our client's requirements for redundancy, we ended up with an unusual (at least to my inexperienced eyes) system configuration. Our client has two buildings that use our application. Each building has an application server and a storage server. All are runnning Windows Server 2003. An iSCSI controller running on a building's storage server is configured to map an image on the D drive of that server to appear as the H drive on the building's application server. So, anything written to the H drive by the application server actually is stored in STORAGE\\d:/DataStorage/data.img. PostgreSQL 8.4 is running on the application server, configured to use the H drive to store data. Therefore, data is actually being stored on the storage server's D drive.
The storage servers for each building also have the task of backing up data for the other building. Symantec's Backup Exec is used for that purpose. But we found that when the backup job that was supposed to back up one building's storage server ran, the PostgreSQL service on that building's application server stopped. We tried excluding the folder containing the image used as the H drive from the backup, but it didn't help.
Has anyone else seen a Backup Exec backup job stop a Postgres service? Can anyone suggest ways to avoid the problem? (I'm already fighting to run PostgreSQL on the storage server instead of the application server. I see no benefit to having the service running on one machine and storing data on the other. If a terrorist blows up the storage server, it will take all of ten minutes to re-install PostgreSQL.)
RobR