On Thu, May 08, 2003 at 14:39:08 -0400,
mlaks <mlaks@bellatlantic.net> wrote:
>
> now we would not want to kill the postmaster, of course. But should we even be
> TERM'ing the postmaster? I dont know. What do the Postgresql Gurus say?
I regularly use svc -d to shutdown postmaster and svc -u to restart it.
This works just fine.
> Moreover, if we agree that we need to imbed pg_ctl or postmaster in a script
> to handle the above things, it should be doable to handle all of the assorted
> other files if they are neccesary to handle .
You don't have to do that.
> Also what would be the problem in checking for the existence of a postmaster
> and if none exists then killing the lock files.
I would be very leary of putting this in a script. postmaster already does
this and trying to be smarter than it might cause you a lot of grief.
> My main problem is that I have machines that get creamed by power surges, and
> then wont restart postgresql on reboot of the system because of the damn lock
> files. I really want to deal with them up front!
Most of the time when I have unscheduled shutdowns postgres comes up without
problem. I don't remember if I have had any since I switched to using
supervise though. I have had more issues with someone needing to answer
a question from fsck from the console than postgresql not coming up.
> MOreover can you tell me more about what init uses the locks for?
To tell if the service is already running or not.
>
> what is the role of the files
>
> /var/run/postmaster.pid
> /var/lock/subsys/postgresql
>
> that Lamar carefully adds and subtracts?
I don't know exactly, but I would expect that the pid file is a lock for
the service and that the subsys file is a lock to keep two init scripts
from running for the same time for the same service.