Re: auto removing stale pid for postmaster NT service

On Mon, Sep 16, 2002 at 05:27:38PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:

> FYI, sendmail has the same restart failure mode; I imagine a lot of
> other Unix daemons do too.

Yes, as far as I know atd, klogd, and ypbind also fail this way, at
least on some flavours of Linux (where I've had it happen).  And ISTR
that some bit of NFS didn't recover correctly under Solaris 2.6, but
I can't recall for sure now.

> It wasn't yet, mainly because it's not obvious how to tell reliably
> whether some other process is a postmaster or not.

I had a feeling this might be the case.  I think the suggestion of a
boot-time "cleaning script" is a good idea -- something run by root
before switching runlevels is the obvious answer -- but that's the
sort of thing that probably should be hand-crafted by a competent
sysadmin for each case.  In some environments, there are good reasons
not to restart things in case of crash.  (If the hardware is flakey,
for instance, you might not want the service to be going up and
down.)

A

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