Douglas McNaught <doug@mcnaught.org> writes:
> Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> writes:
>> Could be. The actual standard use of SIGTERM is to kill processes
>> belonging to your terminal process group when you log out.
> I thought that was SIGHUP?
Doh. Not enough caffeine absorbed yet.
As penance, here's a comment that I think is actually correct: sending
SIGINT to the postmaster will make it turn around and send SIGTERM to
all the backends. So there are two different explanations for the
backends giving the "administrator command" error: either some outside
force sent them SIGTERM directly, or some outside force sent the
postmaster SIGINT. The SIGINT-the-postmaster theory is the more likely,
I suspect, and that again could be associated with having carelessly
left the postmaster attached to one's terminal. In any case, the first
thing to do is look in the postmaster log and see if you see a message
about "received fast shutdown request", which would be proof one way or
the other.
regards, tom lane