thanks for all of the input everyone. I believe you have helped lead me to the
problem. two days ago iI ran out of room on the partition. Postgres was
running at the time, but complaining about the fact that it was out of room.
so in an effort to make more room I foolishly removed what I thought was a test
db. that was where postgres looks for its configuration info. when postgres
died today it wasn't able to find that info for the restart. If it wouldn't
have died for whatever reason today it would never have needed to locate those
files. I guess it's time to reload postgres. Any suggestions aout how?
thanks again
dave
Francisco Reyes wrote:
> On Thu, 8 Nov 2001, KUCHARSKI, DAVID R. wrote:
>
> > when I try:
> > #su postgres
> > $ postmaster
> >
> > I get the following:
> > /usr/bin/postmaster doesn't know where to find database system data. You
> > must specify the directory that contains the database system either by
> > specifying the -D invocation option or by setting the PGDATA environment
> > variable.
>
> Try "su - postgres".
> The error you are seeing is basically a lack of configuration.
> I believe there is an OS variable "pgdata" which gets set when the
> postgres user is started and this is how the database knows where the
> database directory is.