I just tried installing Postgres 8.1.4 (RPMs from postgresql.org web site) on a clean RHEL4 Update 2 machine that had SELinux enabled.
When I created a /etc/sysconfig/pgsql/postgresql config file with PGDATA=/data/pgdata I was unable to get the start script (/etc/init.d/postgresql) to populate the data directory nor launch postgres (after I manually did an initdb on the directory) The file permissions were drwx------ 11 postgres postgres 4096 Jul 27 12:51 pgdata But the pgstartup.log was still reporting that initdb coudln't create write to /data/pgdata (Permission denied) When I manually copied and pasted the line that was in /etc/init.d/postgresql to the command line, it ran just fine (executing as root) runuser -l postgres -c "/usr/bin/initdb --pgdata='/data/pgdata' --auth='ident sameuser'" >> "/var/lib/pgsql/pgstartup.log" 2>&1 < /dev/null But there's some voodoo going on when this is executed inside of the start script ... I started monkeying around with cutting the start script down to the point where I finally got this error to appear (I believe it was removing the </dev/null redirect): Your default context is user_u:system_r:unconfined_t. Do you want to choose a different one? [n] If I just hit enter, the script would continue and successfully create the data directory and launch postgres To be perfectly clear: If I don't set a custom PGDATA in /etc/sysconfig/pgsql/postgresql, everything works fine ... the data directory is created in /var/lib/pgsql/data as expected ... it's only with the custom PGDATA .. Long story short, I have disabled SELinux on this box because this isn't the first time SELinux stuff has burned hours of my day and this is an internal box so I don't feel it's worth the battle right now ... but figured that maybe someone else out there might benefit from reading this ... -Dave ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
