postmaster dead but backends still running?

I've got what looks like a really strange situation on my hands (or else
I've got a normal situation that I'm looking at strangely): It appears
that the main postmaster process is dead & gone, but I have a bunch of
backends still running.

I can't connect to the database server any more, but a bunch of old
persistent connections (which are about four days old and which I think
are being kept alive by my web server) are still up & running; at least
some of them are serving data to web pages.

To wit:

[rhodes] data/$ /usr/ucb/ps axuw | grep post
postgres  9238  0.2  1.4 8664 5104 ?        S   Jun 13  3:13
/its/software/bin/postmaster
postgres  9268  0.1  1.4 8672 5144 ?        S   Jun 13  3:26
/its/software/bin/postmaster
postgres  8920  0.1  0.6 2480 2024 pts/0    R 11:08:26  0:00 bash
postgres  9237  0.1  1.4 8664 5104 ?        S   Jun 13  3:01
/its/software/bin/postmaster
root      5411  0.0  0.4 1904 1448 ?        S   Jun 09  0:00
/software/stow/postfix-2.0.10/libexec/postfix/master
postfix   5413  0.0  0.4 1992 1528 ?        S   Jun 09  0:00 qmgr -l -t
fifo -u
postfix   8857  0.0  0.4 1960 1552 ?        S 11:03:14  0:00 pickup -l
-t fifo -u
postgres  9236  0.0  1.4 8664 5120 ?        S   Jun 13  3:12
/its/software/bin/postmaster
postgres  9243  0.0  1.5 8720 5584 ?        S   Jun 13  3:06
/its/software/bin/postmaster
postgres  9254  0.0  1.4 8656 5128 ?        S   Jun 13  3:22
/its/software/bin/postmaster
postgres  9278  0.0  1.4 8664 5192 ?        S   Jun 13  3:08
/its/software/bin/postmaster
postgres  9333  0.0  1.5 8672 5312 ?        S   Jun 13  3:33
/its/software/bin/postmaster
postgres  9379  0.0  1.4 8720 5176 ?        S   Jun 13  3:08
/its/software/bin/postmaster
postgres  9431  0.0  1.4 8672 5112 ?        S   Jun 13  3:18
/its/software/bin/postmaster
postgres  9877  0.0  0.0 2480    ? pts/0    R 11:47:15  0:00 bash

The file /var/pgsql/data/postmaster.pid claims that the postmaster's PID
is 27215; there's no process with that PID running on my system.

Whenever I try to create a new connection, it fail:

[rhodes] data/$ psql template1
psql: could not connect to server: No such file or directory
         Is the server running locally and accepting
         connections on Unix domain socket "/tmp/.s.PGSQL.5432"?
[rhodes] data/$ psql -h localhost template1
psql: could not connect to server: Connection refused
         Is the server running on host localhost and accepting
         TCP/IP connections on port 5432?

Any ideas on what I should do now? I'm running 7.3.2 on Solaris 7.

-Charlie

--
Charles Hornberger
Caltech
Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences
M/C 228-77
Tel (626) 395-3474