Anyone have any suggestions on novel phrases to offer in my incantations for
getting this script to do everything I need?
You need to add "-l $LOGFILE" where log is wherever you want to write
the stderr+stdout from the postmaster to. Then it will return once
starting the server.
Also, is there any way, in the case of shutting down the
production instance for the second pass, to have the shutdown command wait
indefinitely? "-m smart" will give up after waiting so long, and I'd like
neither to interrupt any running jobs, nor end up not taking a backup in the
event a running job outlasts pg_ctl's timeout.
Not that I know of, but you can poll the server status using the same
pg_ctl command constructs as you're using already but with "status"
instead of "stop" or "start". pg_ctl (and hence ssh) will return 0 if
the server is running and 1 if the server is no running.
So you could try something like
while ssh $REMOTE pg_ctl -D $CLUSTER status
do
echo "Remote server still running - continuing to wait ..."
sleep 10
done
Hope this helps,
Robin
