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Received: by postgres.Berkeley.EDU (5.61/1.29)
	id AA02529; Wed, 20 Nov 91 13:03:30 -0800
Message-Id: <9111202103.AA02529@postgres.Berkeley.EDU>
From: postarch (Postgres Mailing Archive)
Subject: Re: Problem with the Postgres backend
To: postgres@postgres.berkeley.edu
Sender: pg_adm@postgres.berkeley.edu
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 19 Nov 91 22:17:51 EST."
             <9111200316.AA00031@postgres.Berkeley.EDU> 
Date: Wed, 20 Nov 91 13:02:53 PST

In message <9111200316.AA00031@postgres.Berkeley.EDU> you write:
> Hi there,
>  
> I'm pretty new to Postgres.  I'm the system administrator of a network
> of Sun computers in the department of math and computer science.
>  
> I have installed Postgres version 3 and it's beginning to get used by
> our students.  Today I had a problem that I couldn't resolve and I am
> asking for your help.
>  
> A few users came and told me that they had the message that "the backend
> is not responding".  Thinking that the backend is the process started
> with the postmaster command, I did a "ps aux|grep postmaster" and saw
> that it was running.
>  
> So I decided to restart it.  I did a "su - postgres" followed by "cd
> bin" and "postmaster &" and received a message like "can't bind to
> port".  I said "of course, the old postmaster is still there", so I
> killed it and tried to restart it but had the same message everytime I
> tried: "can't bind to port".  And since I had killed the old postmaster,
> I was stuck with no postmaster at all!
>  
> I even tried a "ipcclean" (or something like that) and it didn't fix
> the problem.

The response given by rad@eecs.cs.pdx.edu is right.  If there's no other
postmaster running and you still can't bind to the port the socket hasn't
been cleared.  You should make sure there are no backend processes still
hanging around.  When postgres processes die unnaturally the socket isn't
always closed.  It can take some time before things time out.


Jeff Meredith
mer@postgres.berkeley.edu