IpcSemaphoneInitialize ... Invalid Argument (Solved)

    I noticed back in the archives around June that somebody was having a
problem which I encountered running 7.3.4 on Cygwin, Win2K. I fixed it, so
I thought I'd post the solution to the list, since I didn't notice it
having been posted. Forgive me if it's already been solved before. :-)

    The postmaster service fails to start, and the error message in
/var/log/postmaster.log is:

    IpcSemaphoreInitialize: semctl(id=2, 0, SETVAL, 0) failed: Invalid argument
    LOG:  startup process (pid 2532) exited with exit code 1
    LOG:  aborting startup due to startup process failure

    What apparently happened is that the Win2K SCM had the wrong password for
the "./postgres" user.

    More specifically, the incantation that I went through which seemed to fix it:

    1) Changed postmaster to log on as Local System, and attempt to start it.
(Failed to start.)
    2) Change postmaster back to logging on as "postgres", and re-type in the
password for "postgres" in the provided box.
    3) Start postmaster using "net start postmaster" in Cygwin.

    -Max