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.

regards, tom lane