can't get connection during pg_dump

Hi,

I'm running 8.1.x on FC2 with smp.

The docs claim that pg_dump should allow normal operation of the db with the exception of things like 'VACUUM FULL'.

Last night during backup, I noticed that I could not get a connection, either remotely via jdbc or locally via psql.
Wellperhaps that is inaccurate: 'ps -ef' showed several processes with a status message of "waiting to startup" (or
somethingsimilar; sorry, I was late-night coding and didn't think to write it down). 

My installation has three databases in use. The command used to invoke the dump of one of these databases was:
/usr/local/pgsql/bin/pg_dump -Fc -b mydatabasename > /back/mydatabasename.dump

I looked through the docs to see if there was some runtime configuration I was missing, but saw nothing.

Anyone know what I might be doing wrong?

Thanks,
--
Steve Linabery, sysadmin/developer
B94B C3C7 8A27 FF09 3C9D  E992 5A20 2492 D5F5 EE51


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