Re: Power outage borked things (8.1.10)... - Mailing list pgsql-admin

From Hannes Dorbath
Subject Re: Power outage borked things (8.1.10)...
Date
Msg-id 47BDF468.3090001@theendofthetunnel.de
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Power outage borked things (8.1.10)...  (Michael Monnerie <michael.monnerie@it-management.at>)
Responses Re: Power outage borked things (8.1.10)...
List pgsql-admin
Michael Monnerie wrote:
> On Mittwoch, 20. Februar 2008 Tom Lane wrote:
>> 5. Figure out why a simple power failure was able to do this to you,
>> and fix it.  The most likely bet is that your disk drives are lying
>> about write completion ... see the PG archives for discussion.
>
> It could be a caching RAID controller without battery backup unit.
> Nothing help you in a power failure then, except a good backup.
> Had this with a customer - no more filesystem after reboot...

I hardly understand why such things still happen today. It's one of the
most important admin tasks to make sure fsync / fua behave as they should.

Wouldn't it be a good idea to add a chapter to the installation docs?

They cover SHM settings and vm.overcommit -- why not a short
introduction to fsync, write caches, write barriers and a few examples
of sane and problematic setups as well as links to tools to verify a setup?


--
Best regards,
Hannes Dorbath

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