postgres at reboot

Hi Everybody,

About 1.5 month ago, my machine (which runs redhat linux
2.6.9-78.0.1.ELsmp on Dell hardware with postgres 8.3.3)
had a terrible crash. I am mostly recovered, but there
is at least one more thing that's not right.

Namely, when the machine gets rebooted, postgres doesn't
start automatically. Before the crash, there was no such
problem.

I see a file /etc/rc.d/init.d/postgresql. Is this the
start-up script? If not, please tell me what would be the
correct one (and where would I find one). If it is, can you
please tell me where I would find the latest one anyway?
(Maybe the latest one got lost and I am looking at an old
copy???)

The detail of how it happens escapes me, but as near as I
can reconstruct in my head, after the reboot I discover that
postgres is not running and I issue:
pg_ctl start
and it complains something to the effect that it is already
started (which seems to be not true) and maybe it gives me
a pid for the postmaster. I think I tried:
pg_ctl stop
and it told me something a bit disageeable. But I found a
file with that pid in /tmp directory and when I remove that
file, then "pg_ctl start" succeeds.

If this sounds familiar to you (or you have some clue as to
what is going on), I would appreciate a tip.

Regards,

Tena Sakai
tsakai(at)gallo(dot)ucsf(dot)edu