"simon.marshall" <simon.marshall@metaswitch.com> writes:
> When I came to stop my postgres instance (in particular, a replication
> database using postgres version 9.0.3 running on port 5442) today it failed
> to stop because the postmaster.pid instance wasn't present, despite the
> process still running (seen by running ps -eaf | grep post and noting that
> the data directory was the same). There's nothing in /var/adm/messages to
> suggest any catastrophic disk problems and there's plenty of space on the
> drive.
> Any help would be greatly appreciated, as I'm stumped!
If I had to bet on the basis of that much information, I'd bet on
accidental invocation of a postmaster startup script that thinks it
should remove the postmaster.pid file before trying to launch a new
postmaster. I've seen a lot of those, and every one of them is
dangerously broken.
regards, tom lane