Re: [Gnumed-devel] Postgres installation and setup in lenny

[James Busser]

On 3-Sep-08, at 2:14 PM, Karsten Hilbert wrote:

> > making me wonder if the above something normally needed to be done
> > manually?
> No. The data directory for PG on Debian is somewhere under /var/ 
> postgresql/
> if I recall correctly. Just su from root to postgres and check  
> where you are in
> the directory tree.
>
> Or cat /etc/passwd to show the homedir of postgres.

The homdir at postgres appears to be

        /var/lib/postgresql

Although I am not sure how to verify that a cluster has already been  
initialized. I could not confirm that Postgres SQL was really  
working. I should have thought it would have started at system boot,  
so I tried to connect to the default database 'template1':
   su postgres
   psql template1 -U postgres

but I got

address@hidden:~$ sudo su postgres
[sudo] password for jb:
address@hidden:/home/jb$ psql template1 -U postgres
psql: could not connect to server: No such file or directory
        Is the server running locally and accepting
        connections on Unix domain socket "/var/run/postgresql/.s.PGSQL.5432"?
address@hidden:/home/jb$

So I tried to start it manually using pg_ctl

debianhost:/home/jb# su postgres
address@hidden:/home/jb$ pg_ctl start -l logfile
bash: pg_ctl: command not found

Which I then located pg_ctl in
   /usr/lib/postgresql/8.3/bin/pg_ctl
and also located
   /usr/bin/pg_ctlcluster

whereas my $PATH is
address@hidden:/home/jb$ echo $PATH
/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/games

So I guess the installer both fails to configure postgres to start at  
system boot, and did not add to my path.

So I tried adding to my path so that pg_ctl would be seen, and then got
address@hidden:/home/jb$ export PATH=/usr/lib/postgresql/8.3/ 
bin/:$PATH
address@hidden:/home/jb$ pg_ctl start -l logfile
pg_ctl: no database directory specified and environment variable  
PGDATA unset
Try "pg_ctl --help" for more information.
address@hidden:/home/jb$

So I provided a -D with /var/lib/postgresql
address@hidden:~$ pg_ctl start -l logfile -D /var/lib/postgresql
server starting

Which at least seemed to satrt the server, but when I try to connect  
to template1 I get
address@hidden:~$ psql template1 -U postgres
psql: could not connect to server: No such file or directory
        Is the server running locally and accepting
        connections on Unix domain socket "/var/run/postgresql/.s.PGSQL.5432"?
address@hidden:~$

and despite that the server was supposedly starting, I cannot confirm  
an active process
address@hidden:~$ ps ax | grep "post"
 5401 ?        Sl     6:29 /usr/lib/iceweasel/firefox-bin -a firefox  
file:///usr/share/doc/postgresql-doc-8.3/html/intro-whatis.html
 7185 pts/4    S      0:00 su postgres
 7226 pts/3    S      0:00 su postgres
 7342 pts/3    S+     0:00 grep post

What now?

==========================
PS that directory which I was going to specify for initidb (which you  
identified as not being a good place) came from the postgresql-8.3  
documents
   http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/creating-cluster.html