Enquiry about setting Up PostgreSQL 8.4 PIRT

Dear all,

We are using Postgres 8.4 in Windows environment in our setting. I have been tasked with setting up a Postgres PITR. Having gone through the documentation, I have bumped into certain issues that hasn’t made my setup sucessful. What I have done is  setup 2 servers. First, I modified main server’s postgresql.conf by enabling archive_mode and puttiing the command to perform the actual archiving, and this is all good.

I have further created a windows scheduled task that copies the archived WAL files to a remote server(the Postgres slave server). I have also installed Grsync on the Master server to help me copy files from main server to slave even as the main is being used, as previous copy command on Windows cmd always displayed errors of along the lines of “cannot access file, file being used by another process”.  

After running  select pg_start_backup('Master_Base_Backup);  on the main server, I launch Grsync to copy the main server’s data dir to the slave server. When this process completes, I run

select pg_stop_backup();  on the main server again.

I then copy all the data from Master server to the slave’s data dir (deleting all files in pg_xlog and postmaster.pid and modifying postmaster.conf appropriately). I have created the needed recovery.conf (as mentioned on the documentation). On restarting the slave, the server restarts and hopefully restores the WAL files, I say hopefully  because, NO more WAL files are copied from the archive directory to pg_xlog on the slave. And on creating a table in the Master server, it is not reflected on the slave server.

Kindly inform me where I might have erred. Thanks in advance for your support and feedback.

Kind regards,

Caesar Olima

Kilifi, Kenya