Robert J Lee wrote:
Sorry if this is not strictly relevant, but I wanted to give this back to the community in some form. Since I've spent some time working this out, it might be useful to note that the permissions on the device files /dev/* are different between running an install and running a live system. If, for instance, you try to create a Postgresql database on Red Hat Enterprise 5 using "service postgres start" in a kickstart script, then it will create the pg_log directory but then fail. (Of course, the pg_log directory is left there so initdb will then refuse to create the database again, but that's by the by). The solution to this is to ensure that users other than root have whatever read/write access they need to the device files they are using. Many servers are shipped with databases and software pre-installed, and so it wouldn't surprise me if this affected other major software packages, any yet I couldn't find anything on the issue with a Google search. Maybe people are giving up and doing manual installs, or cloning disk images or something? Perhaps this could be made more prominent in the documentation? Anyway, I hope that helps someone. Getting an obscure error like "/dev/null: Permission denied" (when it was actually another device file causing the problem) isn't too easy to figure out. Robert J. Lee
Perhaps you should be configuring Postgres at firstboot, or otherwise just creating an init script
that is installed in %post and then disables itself? Setting up databases in %post seems a bit heavy to me. --Michael
