Re: Idea for improving buildfarm robustness

On 09/29/2015 01:48 PM, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> Joe Conway wrote:
>> On 09/29/2015 12:47 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
>>> We could possibly add additional checks, like trying to verify that
>>> pg_control has the same inode number it used to. But I'm afraid that
>>> would add portability issues and false-positive hazards that would
>>> outweigh the value.
>>
>> Not sure you remember the incident, but I think years ago that would
>> have saved me some heartache ;-)
>
> I remember it, but I'm not sure it would have helped you. As I recall,
> your trouble was that after a reboot the init script decided to initdb
> the mount point -- postmaster wouldn't have been running at all ...

Right, which the init script non longer does as far as I'm aware, so
hopefully will never happen again to anyone.

But it was still a case where the postmaster started on one copy of
PGDATA (the newly init'd copy), and then the contents of the real PGDATA
was swapped in (when the filesystem was finally mounted), causing
corruption to the production data.

Joe

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