Re: production server down - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Alvaro Herrera
Subject Re: production server down
Date
Msg-id 20041218232730.GA22503@dcc.uchile.cl
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: production server down  (Joe Conway <mail@joeconway.com>)
Responses Re: production server down
Re: production server down
List pgsql-hackers
On Sat, Dec 18, 2004 at 02:28:51PM -0800, Joe Conway wrote:

Hi,

> Apparently, either because of the server hang, or because of the flakey 
> eth0 interface on reboot, pg_control had become "corrupt". However, it 
> was not corrupt in the sense that it contained impossibly invalid data. 
> In fact, as pointed out by Alvaro, it had values that all look close to 
> those one would find in a recently initdb'd pg_control file, except the 
> last modified date:

I can't help remembering the fact that the init script executes an
initdb automatically if it finds an empty data directory (the ones I
know of at least -- does the one you are running?).  Maybe what happened
was that it found the empty mount point, executed an initdb, and then
the NFS drive came online.  Later, the pg_control file was sync'ed to
the "empty database" settings.  It'd be interesting to know if the
mount point does have some files on it.

These values (from the corrupt pg_control file) are strange:

> pg_control last modified:             Tue Dec 14 15:39:26 2004
> Time of latest checkpoint:            Tue Nov  2 17:05:32 2004

Maybe the latest checkpoint date has some interesting bit pattern that
could explain it somehow.

-- 
Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[@]dcc.uchile.cl>)
"El sentido de las cosas no viene de las cosas, sino de
las inteligencias que las aplican a sus problemas diarios
en busca del progreso." (Ernesto Hernández-Novich)


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