On Fri, 23 Sep 2011, John R Pierce wrote:
> did the system run some sort of fsck autorepair when it restarted? thats
> about the only thing I could think of that might have messed with the
> permissions.
The file system is ext3 so it did restore from the journals.
Anyway, now I know if I should ever again be unable to start postgres,
check the permissions per the error message.
Thanks again,
Rich