Thread: Usability Question
Hi,
I have just started to have a look at Postgres for the first time (after downloading version 8.1.0). What I read about it in the past weeks sounded promising. As recommended I had shut down the firewall/virus checking software on my developer machine during install. Never the less I received an error message that the server could not be started already during the installation procedure. Surprisingly after pushing okay I received the message, that the installation has been completed successfully (and was unsure if I can trust this statement). I then found the server running as a service under WIN XP. I continued by using pdAdminIII and now often receive a message basically saying that "the server was shutdown unexpectedly". Reading through the FAQ and Online docs I found the comment that in most cases virus protecting and/or firewall software causes this problem and the recommendation to stop using or even to uninstall this software. It is hard to believe that this is a serious advice. Is one really expected to quite using antivirus/firewall software if one wants to use postgres? I would imagine that this would be a knock-out criteria for the product not just for me, but for a lot of people.
Thanks
Thomas
Hill-Managementberatung@t-online.de wrote: > Reading through the FAQ and Online docs I found the comment that in most > cases virus protecting and/or firewall software causes this problem and the > recommendation to stop using or even to uninstall this software. It is hard > to believe that this is a serious advice. Is one really expected to quite > using antivirus/firewall software if one wants to use postgres? I would > imagine that this would be a knock-out criteria for the product not just for > me, but for a lot of people. I think the point is to stop the anti-virus software interfering with PostgreSQL accessing its files. Obviously this sort of thing can cause problems with any database. The problem is - how do you provide detailed advice on how to do this for every version of every anti-virus package in every configuration? So - if you don't know how to configure your anti-virus/firewall software, or read system/application logs, there's not much the project can do to even help. That seems to include a lot of Windows users (who may even just be running the av/firewall software that came with the machine and not even know what it's doing for them). The two things you need to allow are: 1. Access to whatever network port(s) you have PG listening on. 2. Access to PG's files (and they're all in one place by default) to the various PG processes. Alternatively, you could switch to one of the Unix/Linux/BSD distributions which tend to manage system integration a little better than MS-Windows. -- Richard Huxton Archonet Ltd