Re: Server tries to read a different config file than it is supposed to - Mailing list pgsql-general

From root, presumably ...

I thought of a different theory: maybe the server's complaint is not due to trying to read that file as a config file, but it's just because there is an unreadable/unwritable file in the data directory. See Christoph Berg's complaint at http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20150523172627.GA24277@... This would only apply if the OP was trying to use this week's releases though. Also, I thought the fsync-everything code would only run if the server had been shut down uncleanly. Which maybe it was, but that bit of info wasn't provided either.

I was doing this after I upgraded to 9.4.2, yes. As for the shut down: I suspect the server was rebooted without explicitly stopping Postgres. Not sure how this plays out in terms of cleanliness. This is everything relevant in the log file after I ran the start script: 2015-05-23 10:36:39.999 GMT [2102][0]: [1] LOG: database system was interrupted; last known up at 2015-05-23 08:59:41 GMT
2015-05-23 10:36:40.053 GMT [2102][0]: [2] FATAL: could not open file "/storage/postgresql/9.4/data/postgresql.conf": Permission denied
2015-05-23 10:36:40.054 GMT [2100][0]: [3] LOG: startup process (PID 2102) exited with exit code 1
2015-05-23 10:36:40.054 GMT [2100][0]: [4] LOG: aborting startup due to startup process failure

I also tried the same situation on two other Ubuntu servers with the same version of Postgres (also upgraded to 9.4.2) and the same directory layout - made postgresql.conf in the data directory unaccessible, even renamed it, and everything worked fine. The only difference is that these are streaming-replicated standby servers. They also had been restarted without explicitly terminating Postgres.