Re: BUG #5862: Postgres dumps core upon a connection attempt

On Thu, 2011-02-03 at 22:23 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Craig Ringer <craig(at)postnewspapers(dot)com(dot)au> writes:
> > On 02/03/2011 11:15 PM, Matt Zinicola wrote:
> >> I re-compiled with '--enable-debug' and got the symbols. The pastebin is at
> >> http://pastebin.com/xMhEHFdT
>
> > That's really interesting. It's getting a NULL path pointer when - I
> > think - it tries to determine the location of the executables.
>
> Hmm ... gdb is evidently lying to us to some extent, because some of
> those variables can't possibly be NULL, and control wouldn't have got
> to where it says if others of them were. However, it seems clear that
> it's dying while trying to determine the actual location of the initdb
> executable. Are there any symlinks involved in the path
> /usr/local/pgsql/bin/initdb ? Is that located on an unusual filesystem?
>
> regards, tom lane

It wasn't an unusual filesystem (other than being within a logical
volume). Nothing out of the ordinary -- a local /ext3 filesystem. I
did a clean re-install of Fedora from scratch, and boom! Postgres
compiled and installed just fine.

Two interesting tidits here (perhaps of note) -- 1) Against my
judgment, I had been using Fedora's upgrade process the last two times I
updated (from F12 to F13, and from F13 to F14). I wonder if that
botched something in my environment and 2) Nothing else on the system
seemed to have trouble (at least up until that point in time). I
suspect it was definitely something underneath Postgres, as when I
deleted everything in /usr/local/pgsql and my cluster (/data/postgres)
and started anew, it still had the very same problem. Just some
additional points of info.

In any case... a "clean" install of Fedora 14 did not yield this
problem, so feel free to close this issue if/when you feel appropriate.

Thanks to everyone that was lending assistance. It's much appreciated.

- Matt