Re: Initdb fails... Again!

Markko and Jason,

Jason Tishler wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 22, 2003 at 04:38:37PM +0200, Markko Paas wrote:
>
>>It seems I have worked around the problem, "ipctest s" started working
>>"out of blue", when I had ipc-daemon running background. Running as
>>service didn't help as it was mentioned in previus postings.
>>
>>After that, initdb went ok. Then I killed the background ipc-daemon.
>>Postmaster seems to be happy with ipc-daemon's service version.
>
>
> Hmm...I recommend getting to the bottom of this because it may stop
> working "out of blue" sometime in the future.

I had a very similar experience: sometimes postgres started, sometimes not.

It turned out that the "postgres" user must have write permissions to
/tmp/MultiFileSem, otherwise both postgres and ipctest fails (when run
from the postgres account).

ipc-daemon creates this file with -rw-r--r-- permissions on my machine.
That means that if ipc-daemon is run from the postgres account when this
file is missing, it will be writable by postgres and all is fine (even
if ipc-daemon is later run as, say, SYSTEM or root by cygrunsrv).

However, if /tmp/MultiFileSem isn't around when ipc-daemon is run as a
service, a new file will be created that is owned by SYSTEM, and hence
not writable by postgres.

So the solution is to either say
chmod a+w /tmp/MultiFileSem
or
chown postgres /tmp/MultiFileSem
before starting postmaster. Probably not a brilliant solution, security
wise, but the only solution I've found.

/dan