Difficulty with make check

First, please accept my apologies and advise me accordingly if I am posting this to the wrong list. I am at wit's end trying to solve this problem.

The platform I am working with is Solaris 10, with some servers being standalone, others being zones. They are divided into three environments: development (one zone), QA (one zone) and production (two standalone).

We are, by company convention, using /opt as the installation location, specifically, any given build of PostgreSQL goes into /opt/postgres/x.y.z, with x.y.z being filled in with the current version number (presently 8.3.7). A symbolic link then points from /opt/postgres/current to /opt/postgres/x.y.z, and another symlink points from /usr/local/pgsql to /opt/postgres/current. Without getting into the whys of all of these, please accept that these facts are unchangeable.

On the development zone, there are no problems at all. I can do this:
./configure --prefix=/opt/postgres/8.3.7 && make -j16 && make -j16 check && make -j16 install
. . . and it just works.

On the QA zone or Production servers, however the same command (adjusted for the number of processors) fails at 'make check' thus:

---8<-cut----------------------------------------------------------------------
./pg_regress --temp-install=./tmp_check --top-builddir=../../.. --srcdir=/usr/us
ers/postgres/build/postgresql-8.3.7/src/test/regress --temp-port=55432 --schedul
e=./parallel_schedule --multibyte=SQL_ASCII --load-language=plpgsql
============== creating temporary installation ==============
============== initializing database system ==============
============== starting postmaster ==============
Killed
Killed
*
Killed
Killed

pg_regress: postmaster did not respond within 60 seconds
Examine ./log/postmaster.log for the reason
make[2]: *** [check] Error 2
make[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/users/postgres/build/postgresql-8.3.7/src/test/
regress'
make[1]: *** [check] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/users/postgres/build/postgresql-8.3.7/src/test'
make: *** [check] Error 2
---8<-cut----------------------------------------------------------------------

The "Killed" message repeats 60 times at what appear to be approximately one-second intervals.

I have tried the following:
* configure and make on dev machine; check on QA -- check fails as above.
* configure and make on QA machine; check on dev -- check succeeds.
* configure, make, check on prod 1 or prod 2 machines -- check fails on either machine.
* configure, make on prod 1 or prod 2, move to dev and check -- check succeeds.

One last tidbit: If I leave off the --prefix= option on the configure, the tests run just fine on all machines.

Although I *could* build and check on the dev machine, and then just 'make install' on the other machines, in my opinion, I feel that I must know what is going wrong here. I need to know why it is b0rked, so that, should this problem manifest elsewhere, it can be fixed. Should the UNIX admins accidentally make a change to the dev zone that causes it to start this behaviour, then I am completely sunk. Should they upgrade the dev server and cause this problem to manifest, then I am likewise sunk. Getting PostgreSQL into this organization is a delicate issue, and, as an open-source advocate, I want to keep it here. This necessarily means satisfying bureaucratic requirements that I am not empowered to change.

Many thanks in advance for any assistance that can be provided.

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