[clug] Alarming SuSE/Postgres problem

[Antti.Roppola at brs.gov.au]

Hi all,

Recently I set up an "out of the box" SuSE 9.1 server with Postgres.

Everything has run swimmingly, except after a couple of weeks, I had
difficulties in restarting Postmaster when making config changes; the
.pid file had gone away. In the end, I created a pid file and shut down
Postmaster. When I restarted Postmaster, *all* the databases created
since the last restart had disapppeared. (eek!)

When Postmaster restarted, it didn't do a log recovery, as far as it
was concerned, that's how the database *ought* to look.

A bit of reading suggests that disk caching settings in Posgres and/or
the filsystem (ext3 on LVM on IDE) may be why (i.e defaults for fsync).
That or how WAL is set up. I'd really like to know what's going on before
trying to induce a repeat of the event. Ideas?

Thanks,

Antti

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