Interesting install issues on Windows 2003 domain server

Hey All,

Just wanted to add this info to the archive and see if anyone has some
useful feedback on this. We did a lot of googling yesterday which lead
me to these things but I can't explain them.

Anyways, we tried to install Postgres 8.4 on a Windows 2003 server which
was also configured as the domain controller within that network. The IT
guys insured us the setup was a pretty out of the box setup without any
funky group policies that would wreak havoc so no issues there. We used
enterprisedb's installers for this.

There were 4 lessons that came out of this install.

1) you must start the installer by rightclicking and choosing run as and
then unticking the box that denies administration rights to the
installer. I think that one's pretty obvious. I guess this is a
forerunning to the admin privileges in Vista/2008 that are correctly
handled by the installer.

2) for some reason the postgres user created that runs the postgres
service will not work. The installer fails at the point the service
tries to start. Manually trying to start the (incompletely installed)
service fails no matter what we tried to change in privilege level of
this user. My best guess here is that the user is created as a local
user and the domain setup blatantly kills it as we haven't had this
issue with other 2003 servers not running AD. But I'm no AD guru so...
Creating a user manually in AD and giving this user rights to run a
service before you start the installer seems to be the way forward.

3) I'm not 100% sure about this one but after reading about it online we
gave the user full access to the postgres installation folder in program
files. Obviously that means creating the folder you are about to install
into before running the installer.

4) the final hint that got us up and running was to NOT give the user
any admin rights neither directly or indirectly. Postgres will be very
upset but as it never gets to a point of creating a log file and
complaining about this we were searching in the dark until we found the
post on the internet that saved us.

Hope this post helps out others.

Cheers,

Bastiaan Olij
e-mail/MSN: bastiaan(at)basenlily(dot)me
web: http://www.basenlily.me
Skype: Mux213
http://www.linkedin.com/in/bastiaanolij