Re: Postgres no longer starts

> Alan Hodgson <ahodgson(at)simkin(dot)ca> writes:
> > On Wednesday, May 30, 2012 08:22:58 PM Bart Lateur wrote:
> >> Luckily this is a development machine, but as we don't know what
> >> causes the problem we fear we might one day face the exact same
> >> problem where it does matter: on a production machine. So we'd like
> >> to know exactly what went wrong..
>
> > Change selinux to permissive instead of enforcing and see if
> > PostgreSQL then runs. If it does, you can look at the selinux logging
> > to see what would have been denied in enforcing mode, and hopefully fix
it from there.
>
> Yeah, I concur that this smells like a selinux issue. Most likely, the
software update you did messed up the selinux "context" settings for some
files. restorecon should be able to fix it for you, if so.
> As Alan says, the kernel log (or separate avc log, depending on how your
system is set up) should show evidence of the problem if this is where it
is.

I thought the same, and I was happy to go in and fix it, but then I found
that SElinux was not even enabled.

Hunting around for more logs I finally found a recently updated log file in
the subdirectory /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_log/. And there I found the message
that pg_hba.conf could not be loaded due to a syntax error in it. Weird, it
was running before...?

It's suboptimal that starting Postgres fails silently. It's also less than
optimal that the location of the log files is a bit of a secret. It's also
suboptimal that Postgres refuses to run because it doesn't understand 1 line
in pg_hba.conf. After all, it's just a data grid, not prose...

Anyway, hint for Postgres newbies (or at least, people who don't spend whole
days administering Postgres, which is about everybody, I guess): find the
logs. They're in the subdirectory pg_log and they have names like
"postgresql-DDD.log" where DDD is the three letter name of the day. The
currently active log is one of them.

Thanks a lot, all of you who replied.

--
Bart Lateur.