Actually I found the solution right after I sent that email (of course):
https://wiki-bsse.ethz.ch/download/attachments/55283107/PostgreSQL_9_Maintenance_Backup_and_Recovery_final.docx
Has to do with the order in which shared libs are loaded when both 9.0 and 9.1 are installed. Renaming the config file
asdescribed in that doc resolved it.
On Jun 13, 2012, at 10:26 PM, Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 11:19:41AM -0400, Evan D. Hoffman wrote:
>> I'm trying to upgrade Postgres 9.0 to 9.1 with pg_upgrade. Both
>> versions are installed from the PGDG Yum repo:
>>
>> -bash-4.1$ /usr/pgsql-9.0/bin/postgres -V
>> postgres (PostgreSQL) 9.0.8
>> -bash-4.1$ /usr/pgsql-9.1/bin/postgres -V
>> postgres (PostgreSQL) 9.1.4
>>
>> I can successfully start and connect to both 9.0 and 9.1. When I run
>> pg_upgrade, it fails with the error "pg_ctl failed to start the new
>> server," however it apparently does start the new server (output
>> below). Any ideas? This is a freshly installed CentOS 6.2 machine
>> with the 9.0 DB copied over from another machine via streaming
>> replication (which I have since ended and the server is now
>> standalone).
>
> Have you looked at the logs from pg_upgrade? Does "pg_ctl -w start"
> work? My guess is that the -w (wait) is failing for some reason. We
> did improve the -w handling in PG 9.1 so I didn't think there were any
> failure cases, but you might have found a new one.
>
> --
> Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> http://momjian.us
> EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com
>
> + It's impossible for everything to be true. +