Re: postmaster.pid not visible

Moving to -general. -hackers is for discussion about PG development.

On Jul 16, 2008, at 1:10 AM, cinu wrote:

> Hi All, I installed PostgreSQL-8.3.1 on my Suse Linux machine

You should upgrade; I'm pretty sure 8.3 is up to 8.3.3 now.

> , it went on fine without any problems and I was able to create and
> access the database, even I was able to start, restart and check
> the status of the service. Since it is my local machine and people
> are remotly connecting to the database on my local machine, I used
> to keep the machine up and running. Today I came and checked and It
> was telling me that the service of postgres is not running, so I
> went and checked the postmaster.pid file it was not in the data
> folder, but I was able to get to the psql prompt and execute
> standard sql statements, even people were able to connect remotly
> and access the databse on my machine. The only difficult that I was
> facing was that I was unable to restart or stop the service. So
> with the help of the ps -ef | grep postgres command I was able to
> trace out the pid and then manually kill the pid with the kill -9
> command, after this I was able to restart, stop or check the status
> of the service.
Don't use kill -9. There's almost never a reason to do that, and
hasn't been for probably 20 years or more.

> Can anyone throw light on why the postmaster.pid was not visible,
> the other intresting factor that I observed was that the postgres
> service was running on the 5432 port this was visible from the /tmp
> location. Also I would like to know if theer is any other
> alternative with which i can restart the service and retain the
> postmaster.pid file.

My guess would be that something went in and removed the .pid file.
--
Decibel!, aka Jim C. Nasby, Database Architect  decibel@decibel.org
Give your computer some brain candy! www.distributed.net Team #1828