Re: Restart after poweroutage

On Sunday 24 September 2006 09:17 am, Tom Lane wrote:
> Jon Lapham <lapham@jandr.org> writes:
> > I recently had another electrical power outage that left my machine
> > unable to restart postgresql.  I had previously reported this a while
> > ago:
> >
> > http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2005-04/msg01286.php
> >
> > Anyway, because I have seen this problem before, I knew exactly what the
> > solution to the problem was (delete the postmaster.pid file),
>
> As was pointed out to you in the discussion subsequent to that message,
> this is not a good automatic response, and it should not be necessary at
> all with a post-8.0 postmaster.
>
> > FATAL:  pre-existing shared memory block (key 5432001, ID 65536) is
> > still in use
>
> This is extremely odd, because a shared memory block could not possibly
> have survived a reboot.  Too bad you have destroyed the evidence,
> because I would like to know what really happened there.  Is it possible
> that you have somehow managed to try to start the postmaster twice
> during your system boot cycle?  If you do have two postmasters running
> in that data directory right now, you are in deep trouble :-(
>
<Snip>
>
>             regards, tom lane
>
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster

In the its a small world department I experienced the same problem shortly
after reading this message. The particulars Postgres 8.1.4, Kubuntu 6.06 on a
laptop. My laptop sometimes experiences issues with ACPI and has to be
powered off. After the most recent event I saw a message similar to that
reported above. I checked and there were no other Postgres instances running.
What information I could collect is included in the attached file.
--
Adrian Klaver
aklaver@comcast.net