an incident maybe worth reporting

Hi Everybody,

I had an interesting thing happen. (And like many other things,
it is kinda funny in the rearview mirror.) This is a story on
Linux and if you are not running postgres on linux or unix, it
would be a waste of time to read.

Yesterday, a colleague told me that he was running postgres 7.3.x.
I said that was strange that we should all be using 8.3.6. It
turned out that he screwed up the PATH variable so that he was
using /usr/bin/psql while the proper path should have been
/usr/local/pgsql/bin/psql. He fixed the path to what it should
be. The end of story for him.

I looked at /usr/bin/psql and decided to issue:
$ chmod 000 /usr/bin/psql

This morning I was alerted by mail that a couple of postgres jobs
via crontab went awry. I thought of it a bit and did the following:

$ cd /usr/bin
$ mv psql psql_ANCIENT
$ ln -s /usr/local/pgsql/bin/psql psql

and re-executed the the crontab jobs, which went fine. Apparently,
the cron did not have a /usr/local/pgsql/bin as a path, but had
/usr/bin and faithfully (for more than a year) executed my sql
commands via older postgres.

I have gone through 3 or 4 upgrades from 7.3 to the current
incarnation and completely forgotten that such (/usr/bin/psql)
existed.

If you are upgrading from older version to new version, this may be
an item on your check list.

Regards,

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