I discovered tonight that if you shut down a server, create
recovery.conf with standby_mode = 'on', and start it back up again,
you get this:
LOG: database system was shut down at 2010-03-30 22:34:09 EDT
LOG: entering standby mode
FATAL: recovery connections cannot start because the
recovery_connections parameter is disabled on the WAL source server
LOG: startup process (PID 22980) exited with exit code 1
LOG: aborting startup due to startup process failure
Now, you might certainly argue that this is a stupid thing to do (my
motivation was to test some stuff) but certainly it's fair to say that
error message is darn misleading, since in fact recovery_connections
was NOT disabled. I believe this is the same "start up from a shut
down checkpoint" problem that's been discussed previously so I won't
belabor the point other than to say that I still think we need to fix
this.
...Robert