Re:

"Mehta, Ashok" <mehtaa@hmc.harvard.edu> writes:
> I get
>  FATAL: StreamServerPort: bind() failed: Permission denied
>  Is another postmaster already running on that port?
>  If not, remove socket node (/tmp/.s.PGSQL.5432) and retry.
>   postmaster: cannot create UNIX stream port

Hmm.  The advice about removing /tmp/.s.PGSQL.5432 is relevant for the
most common case, namely where a socket file's been left around from
the last postmaster run.  And that's pretty much what I'd have expected
to happen after a kill -9 on the postmaster.  But there's something
else going on here, because the kernel error code in that scenario is
normally EADDRINUSE ("Address already in use").  You seem to be getting
EACCES or possibly EPERM ("Permission denied").  That's not even listed
as a possible error for a Unix-socket bind() in my system's man page for
bind...

The first thought that comes to mind is that maybe /tmp is not
world-writable, though I'd think all sorts of stuff would be falling
over if that were true.  Anyway you need to be thinking about
permissions problems.

            regards, tom lane