I tried to set up a simple master/slave setup and immediately ran into this assertion failure. The slave is just a cold copy of the database immediately after initdb. The first WAL segment hasn't been archived yet. It sees that the first archive fail hasn't been archived yet, starts up walreceiver but it looks like the start point hasn't been initialized yet because it hasn't processed any checkpoint WAL records yet.
$ /usr/local/pgsql/bin/postgres -D /var/tmp/pg85/s/ LOG: database system was shut down at 2010-02-23 14:30:08 GMT cp: cannot stat `/var/tmp/pg85/w/000000010000000000000000': No such file or directory TRAP: FailedAssertion("!(startpoint.xlogid != 0 || startpoint.xrecoff != 0)", File: "libpqwalreceiver.c", Line: 87) LOG: WAL receiver process (PID 3536) was terminated by signal 6: Aborted LOG: terminating any other active server processes LOG: startup process (PID 3534) exited with exit code 2 LOG: aborting startup due to startup process failure -- greg -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers