postmaster will not start with stale lockfile but not report why

Rudolf Potucek <potucek@ucalgary.ca> writes:

Oct 4 14:05:45 antimony3 postgresql: Starting postgresql service:
failed

Maybe, just maybe, it would be nice if the server croaked a bit more
vebously?

The postmaster croaks as verbosely as it can. I'll bet lunch that your
system's startup script is redirecting the postmaster's stderr to
/dev/null (or using the -S switch which has the same effect). If so,
we are not the people to complain to ...

regards, tom lane

A pet annoyance with the Linux RPMs... They are shipped with syslog
enabled and postmaster sdtout/stderr redirected to /dev/null. So
unless the user specifically sets up the needed info in
/etc/syslog.conf then they never hear a squeak from PostgreSQL!

I'm by no means an RPM expert, but judging by the installation of
other packages this hopefully can be handled automatically. A suitable
/etc/logrotate.d/postgresql file could be in the RPM and In the
post-install script the following rough steps would take place:

1. Check if /var/log/postgresql is in /etc/syslog.conf, if not add
it:

local0.* /var/log/postgresql

2. Restart syslogd:

/etc/init.d/syslog restart

Obviously there is the added issue of cross distribution file
locations (I'm coming from a Redhat perspective here) - what does the
LSB/FSH say about syslog.conf and logrotate files? Guess i need to
check...

Lamar, would this be easy to do for the RPMs? If you could point me in
the right direction I could take a look...

Thanks, Lee Kindness.

Tom Lane writes: