peter@vfemail.net writes:
> Maybe. How would I do that? I'm running whatever version of PostgreSQL was current in mid-2004.
2004 was a very long time ago :-(. A quick look at the release history
suggests that you could not be running anything newer than about 7.4.2,
and it could easily be a 7.3.x release or something even older instead.
You really ought to update the server version before expending any
additional thought on this, since the odds are reasonably good that that
crash is something we fixed long since.
Do "select version();" to see exactly what version you have got, and
then see about updating to the latest minor release in that major
release series. Such an update should be relatively painless (no dump
and reload) though it'd still be smart to peruse the release notes to
see if there were any small behavioral changes that might affect your
applications:
http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdocs/postgres/release.html
If you still see the crash on the latest minor version, it'd be worth
probing deeper.
regards, tom lane