Re: [GENERAL] pg on Debian servers

On Sat, 2017-11-11 at 13:03 +0000, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
> Apologies for something which is distro related, but I was bitten by
> a
> "silly mistake"- one of my own, I hasten to say- earlier.
>
> Several legacy programs written in Delphi ground to a halt this
> morning,
> which turned out to be because a Debian system had updated its copy
> of
> PostgreSQL and restarted the server, which broke any live
> connections.
>
> At least some versions of Delphi, not to mention other IDE/RAD tools
> with database-aware components, don't automatically try to
> reestablish a
> database session that's been interrupted. In any event, an
> unexpected
> server restart (irrespective of all investment in UPSes etc.) has
> the
> potential of playing havoc on a clustered system.
>
> Is there any way that either the package maintainer or a site
> administrator/programmer such as myself can mark the Postgres server
> packages as "manual upgrade only" or similar? Or since I'm almost
> certainly not the first person to be bitten by this, is there a
> preferred hack in mitigation?
>
> --
> Mark Morgan Lloyd
> markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
>
> [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or
> colleagues]
>
>

Hello Mark,

Probably caused by systemd.

You can disable the postgresql service and
re-name the script in init.d. You then have to start postgres via a
shell script.

You can also mark packages to be on "hold" but I don't know exactly
what happens for major version upgrades as the current version is 9 but
when you run an upgrade via apt it will try to install version 10 which
is no big deal as the binaries will end up in different paths, however

libpq will be updated and that may cause a restart. I run upgrades
without any applications running so I don't know exactly what could
happen when using unattended upgrades.