Re: initdb error

David

I just tried installing PG 9.2.2 on FreeBSD 8.3 and initdb went smoothly
without any problems. the only difference would be that I had it running in
a virtualbox instance. My config were as follows;

FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE-p5 (binary updated through freebsd-update)
PG 9.2.2 (installed through ports)
root filesystem on UFS
ZFS mounted on /example
PG data directory set to /example/pgsql/data

relevant rc.conf entries:
postgresql_enable="YES"
postgresql_data="/example/pgsql/data"

running "/usr/local/etc/rc.d/postgresql initdb" works perfectly. Just
needed to set the correct permissions on /example/pgsql directory.

Amitabh

On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 10:32 AM, David Noel <david(dot)i(dot)noel(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> > You need to talk to some FreeBSD kernel hackers about why link()
> > might be failing here. Since you see it on UFS too, we can probably
> > exonerate the ZFS filesystem-specific code.
> >
> > I did some googling and found that EPERM can be issued if the filesystem
> > doesn't support hard links (which shouldn't apply to ZFS I trust).
> > Also, Linux has a "protected_hardlinks" option that causes certain
> > attempts at creating hard links to fail --- but our use-case here
> > doesn't fall foul of any of those restrictions AFAICS, and of course
> > FreeBSD isn't Linux. Still, I wonder if you're running into some
> > misdesigned or misimplemented security restriction. You might want
> > to look at your kernel parameters and see if any of them look like
> > they might have to do with restricting hard-link operations.
> >
> > Also, since Amitabh failed to duplicate the failure on both earlier
> > and later FreeBSD kernels, and we've not heard reports of this from
> > anybody else either, it seems more than possible that it's a plain
> > old bug in the specific kernel version you're using.
> >
> > As a short-term workaround, I'd suggest rebuilding with
> > HAVE_WORKING_LINK disabled. (Just remove that #define from
> > src/include/pg_config_manual.h and rebuild.)
>
> OK, thanks. I've gotten in touch with the freebsd-hackers mailing
> list. Hopefully we'll be able to get this one figured out.
>
> I compiled a GENERIC kernel and tried it again. Still no luck. But at
> least we know now it wasn't a configuration error.
>