Shane and Tom, you guys nailed it. Although I did have another problem.
I went with Shane's 1610612736 recommendation. However, I suspected all was not well with my file. I had saved it with Edit. Found a vi guide, opened it with vi, cleaned out all the extra header garbage, chaned shhmax and save it. Shut the mac down and restarted. Postres started right up.
Now I have also uncovered another problem, how do you get rid of a sysctl.conf.swp file? Couldn't get that done in vi. But I can even see reference to it outside of vi. If you don't have time to tell me I'll research deleting a swp file when I get done setting up my postgres.
Thank you all,
Doug
On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 2:40 PM, Tom Lane
<tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
Shane Ambler <pgsql@Sheeky.Biz> writes:
> Also of note - you are setting the shmmax to 4GB which is all of your
> ram to shared memory. A bit extreme even if it was a postgres only
> dedicated server.
I have some recollection that OSX treats that as a 32bit number, which
means you *can't* set it >= 4GB. Try 1GB or 2GB just to get it working.
regards, tom lane