I haven't been following this thread, but FWIW, here is a simple bash script I use to rebuild a hot standby when I'm testing.
It assumes that the master is correctly set up for replication, that the port is 5432. and that the replication user is named "replication".
Runs on CentOS, haven't tried it on any other distro.
This is a script I call /root/recreate_standby.sh, and gets run as root. This is optional, if you run it as postgres. remove the "sudo su - postgres -c" sections.
Watch out for word-wrapping from the email client.
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#!/bin/bash
## This script runs on the standby.
## Executed as root, else remove the "sudo - postgres -c" commands.
## Assumes you have a valid recovery.conf saved at
## $PGDATA/../recovery.conf.bkp
export PGDATA=/path/to/data/dir ## Must be set correctly
export PGPORT=5432
export MASTER=192.168.x.x ## IP or host entry for the master Postgresql server
export PGBIN=/usr/pgsql-9.3/bin
service postgresql-9.3 stop -m immediate
if [ $? != 0 ]; then
service postgresql-9.3 start
echo "Could not shut down PostgreSQL. Aborting."
exit 1
fi
rm -rf $PGDATA
if [ $? != 0 ]; then
echo "Could not remove the PostgreSQL $PGDATA dir. Aborting."
exit 1
fi
## If the replication role is not set to "trust" in the master's
## pg_hba.conf file, the password will need to be passed into the command below,
## and "--no-password" will need to be removed or revised to be "--password"
su - postgres -c "$PGBIN/pg_basebackup --pgdata=$PGDATA --host=$MASTER --port=$PGPORT --username=replication --no-password --xlog-method=stream --format=plain --progress --verbose"
su - postgres -c "cp -p $PGDATA/../recovery.conf.bkp $PGDATA/recovery.conf"
service postgresql-9.3 start
su - postgres -c "$PGBIN/pg_isready -U postgres -p $PGPORT -t2"
while [ $? != 0 ]; do
echo "Sleep 1 second, check if slave is up yet. If not, sleep again."
sleep 1;
su - postgres -c "$PGBIN/pg_isready -U postgres -p $PGPORT -t2"
done
su - postgres -c "$PGBIN/psql -d postgres -U postgres -qXc 'select pg_is_in_recovery() as is_pg_in_recovery'"
exit 0