IBM Support

System unable to start because postmaster.pid already exists

Troubleshooting


Problem

nzstart command uable to start, and you are getting error like the followings: Lock file "/nz/data.1.0/postmaster.pid" already exists.

Symptom

The problem could happened after an software upgrade on a IBM PureData System for Analytics system. Where 'nzstart' command will fail with the following error message:

nzstart: Error: unexpected error accessing system catalog:
Lock file "/nz/data.1.0/postmaster.pid" already exists.
Is another postgres (pid 5907) running in "/nz/data.1.0"

This is not allowing the system to come back up

Cause

postmaster.pid file is a lock file. This file is used to make sure that only a single master process: "postmaster" is running.

In this case, the file was not cleared properly; possibly from the abnormal termination of postmaster process previously; or some other process is preventing the file to be deleted.

When this happened, 'nzstart' fails to startup normally.

Diagnosing The Problem

The system is not online, but when you issues this command:

ls -l /nz/data.1.0/postmaster.pid

If the file existed, you will the get the error message below:

nzstart: Error: unexpected error accessing system catalog:
Lock file "/nz/data.1.0/postmaster.pid" already exists.
Is another postgres (pid 5907) running in "/nz/data.1.0"

Also run 'lsof +d /nz/data.1.0' ; you should not see any process still using that directory.

Resolving The Problem

    1. Run 'nzstop' to make sure that all processes are stop properly.
    2. As 'root' user, run 'service nzhealthcheck stop'
    3. Log out of all nz sessions (CLI and client connections).
    4. Log back in and check whether /nz/data.1.0/postmaster.pid still exists.
      • ls -ltr /nz/data.1.0/postmaster.pid
    5. Run the following command to check if any process still holding up:
      • lsof +d /nz/data.1.0
    6. Run 'nzstart' again if step 4 & 5 did not returned any result. If not working, please contact IBM Support at http://www.ibm.com/support

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Document Information

Modified date:
17 October 2019

UID

swg21667910