initdb failing

Hello,

I am going throught the pains of initdb failing again. I know that usually
this is a permissions problem but can't remember how I fixed it 18 months
ago (yes we should all have a notebook to document such things...)

I had a working 6.5.x on RedHat 6.2 and (stupidly) decided to upgrade to
7.0.3.

rpm -Uvh postgres*

installs all the bits that interest me, but "initdb -D /var/lib/pgsql" and
"/etc/rc.d/init.d/postgres start" both fail.

postgres]$ initdb -D /home/postgres
This database system will be initialized with username "postgres".
This user will own all the data files and must also own the server process.

Fixing permissions on pre-existing data directory /home/postgres
Creating database system directory /home/postgres/base
Creating database XLOG directory /home/postgres/pg_xlog
Creating template database in /home/postgres/base/template1
Creating global relations in /home/postgres/base
Adding template1 database to pg_database
/usr/bin/initdb: /tmp/initdb.29795: Permission denied
/usr/bin/initdb: /tmp/initdb.29795: Permission denied
/usr/bin/initdb: /tmp/initdb.29795: Permission denied
/usr/bin/initdb: /tmp/initdb.29795: No such file or directory

initdb failed.
Removing /home/postgres.
rm: cannot remove directory `/home/postgres': Permission denied
Failed.
Removing temp file /tmp/initdb.29795.

HELP!!!!

=;-`

Cheers

Tony Grant