Re: 7.4 Crashed... Why?

Verified that no shell startup scripts are running... And the backup
proceeded normally last night with no crash.

I'm starting to think that I'm not going to be able to track this down and
have to hope it doesn't happen again.

> From: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
> Date: Sat, 06 Dec 2003 20:36:39 -0500
> To: Hunter Hillegas <lists(at)lastonepicked(dot)com>
> Cc: PostgreSQL <pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org>
> Subject: Re: [GENERAL] 7.4 Crashed... Why?
>
> Hunter Hillegas <lists(at)lastonepicked(dot)com> writes:
>> I did find a cron job that was running in the suspect time... But all it
>> does is the following:
>> DATE=`date +%Y%m%d`
>> DB1=/root/database_backup/db1_db.$DATE
>> su - postgres -c "/usr/local/pgsql/bin/pg_dump db1" >> $DB1
>> gzip $DB1
>> Is it possible this could cause some strange behavior? This backup script
>> has been running for a year (every night) w/o any trouble.
>
> The cron script itself certainly looks unexceptional. But if "su - postgres"
> executes postgres' ~/.profile or other shell-startup scripts (I think it
> does so on some platforms but not others), maybe you had some weird
> behavior recently added to those scripts?
>
> regards, tom lane