postmaster dead but backends still running?

I've got what looks like a really strange situation on my hands (or else
I've got a normal situation that I'm looking at strangely): It appears
that the main postmaster process is dead & gone, but I have a bunch of
backends still running.

I can't connect to the database server any more, but a bunch of old
persistent connections (which are about four days old and which I think
are being kept alive by my web server) are still up & running; at least
some of them are serving data to web pages.

To wit:

[rhodes] data/$ /usr/ucb/ps axuw | grep post
postgres 9238 0.2 1.4 8664 5104 ? S Jun 13 3:13
/its/software/bin/postmaster
postgres 9268 0.1 1.4 8672 5144 ? S Jun 13 3:26
/its/software/bin/postmaster
postgres 8920 0.1 0.6 2480 2024 pts/0 R 11:08:26 0:00 bash
postgres 9237 0.1 1.4 8664 5104 ? S Jun 13 3:01
/its/software/bin/postmaster
root 5411 0.0 0.4 1904 1448 ? S Jun 09 0:00
/software/stow/postfix-2.0.10/libexec/postfix/master
postfix 5413 0.0 0.4 1992 1528 ? S Jun 09 0:00 qmgr -l -t
fifo -u
postfix 8857 0.0 0.4 1960 1552 ? S 11:03:14 0:00 pickup -l
-t fifo -u
postgres 9236 0.0 1.4 8664 5120 ? S Jun 13 3:12
/its/software/bin/postmaster
postgres 9243 0.0 1.5 8720 5584 ? S Jun 13 3:06
/its/software/bin/postmaster
postgres 9254 0.0 1.4 8656 5128 ? S Jun 13 3:22
/its/software/bin/postmaster
postgres 9278 0.0 1.4 8664 5192 ? S Jun 13 3:08
/its/software/bin/postmaster
postgres 9333 0.0 1.5 8672 5312 ? S Jun 13 3:33
/its/software/bin/postmaster
postgres 9379 0.0 1.4 8720 5176 ? S Jun 13 3:08
/its/software/bin/postmaster
postgres 9431 0.0 1.4 8672 5112 ? S Jun 13 3:18
/its/software/bin/postmaster
postgres 9877 0.0 0.0 2480 ? pts/0 R 11:47:15 0:00 bash

The file /var/pgsql/data/postmaster.pid claims that the postmaster's PID
is 27215; there's no process with that PID running on my system.

Whenever I try to create a new connection, it fail:

[rhodes] data/$ psql template1
psql: could not connect to server: No such file or directory
Is the server running locally and accepting
connections on Unix domain socket "/tmp/.s.PGSQL.5432"?
[rhodes] data/$ psql -h localhost template1
psql: could not connect to server: Connection refused
Is the server running on host localhost and accepting
TCP/IP connections on port 5432?

Any ideas on what I should do now? I'm running 7.3.2 on Solaris 7.

-Charlie

--
Charles Hornberger
Caltech
Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences
M/C 228-77
Tel (626) 395-3474