hi, today i wanted to backup my entire database with a 'pg_dumpall'. during this i got an error message that the copy of a certain table to stderr is not possible. i don't know the exact error message right know it was something like ...
"failure: copy strside ( [columns] ) to stderr" and the dump was aborted.
then i tried to copy the content of the faulty table to another table...
# create table strside2 (like strside); # insert into strside2 select * from strside;
during the insert process the connection to the postgres db was lost. the logfile showed following error message ...
LOG: server process (PID 5540) was terminated by signal 11 LOG: terminating any other active server processes WARNING: terminating connection because of crash of another server process DETAIL: The postmaster has commanded this server process to roll back the current transaction and exit, because another server process exited abnormally and possibly corrupted shared memory. HINT: In a moment you should be able to reconnect to the database and repeat your command. LOG: all server processes terminated; reinitializing LOG: database system was interrupted at 2006-01-20 07:56:30 PST .. following recovery start.
to save the database on a filesystem basis i stopped the postgres server and tried to tar the entire pgdata directory. this process stopped with a "segmentation fault" during the tar process.
after that i wanted to drop the faulty table, because i got another copy of it. however the "drop table strside" process did not stop. i tried a ctrl-c to abort, but it did not work.
the server is running, and i can connect with another psql client, but the drop table process is still present. ps aux shows
postgres 5548 0.0 0.8 16420 4548 ? D 07:58 0:00 postgres: postgres wlan [local] DROP TABLE
i cannot kill it with kill -9, and also i'm not sure if i should. maybe the database is not running after it at all?
