Re: PANIC: heap_update_redo: no block

On 3/19/06, Alex bahdushka <bahdushka(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> On 3/19/06, Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog(at)svana(dot)org> wrote:
> > On Sat, Mar 18, 2006 at 11:55:35PM -0700, Alex bahdushka wrote:
> > > Hi.
> > >
> > > Upon rebooting one of our main production database servers, we were
> > > greeted with this:
> >
> > To help you at all, we *really* need to know what version and platform
> > you're running. In particular, are you running the most recent release
> > of your branch. There have been bug fixes related to WAL recovery in
> > some versions...
>
> Ahh of course! sorry!
>
> select version();
> version
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> PostgreSQL 8.1.3 on i686-pc-linux-gnu, compiled by GCC gcc-3.4 (GCC)
> 3.4.4 20050314 (prerelease) (Debian 3.4.3-13)
>

After doing some more digging, it looks like that server was missing
the appropriate Kpostgresql symlink in /etc/rc0.d/. So upon shutdown
(shutdown -h now)... my guess is it got a sigterm (you know where it
says Sending all processes a TERM signal or whatever), then it (init)
waited 5 seconds or whatever the timeout is and sent a sigkill.

If postgresql took longer to shutdown than that timeout and so was
then given a sigkill and then server turned off.... Could that do it?
(not to mention i don't exactly remember where file system get
unmounted, before or after it sends out those signals, i think its
before though so it might have mounted it read only (couldn't of
unmounted it because it was in use by postgresql)).

Im mainly asking because i would love for this to be user error. It
scares the hell out of me (and my boss obviously). Though i must say
for the 2+ years we have been using postgresql its proven to be very
stable, robust and fast.

Thanks!

<snipped>