Hello people, Fixing the postgres user's home may have been an improvement, but now I get problems with the shared memory segment: acorn$ sudo su postgres -c 'initdb -D /Library/PostgreSQL8/data' Password: The files belonging to this database system will be owned by user "postgres". This user must also own the server process. The database cluster will be initialized with locale C. fixing permissions on existing directory /Library/PostgreSQL8/data ... ok creating subdirectories ... ok selecting default max_connections ... 10 selecting default shared_buffers/max_fsm_pages ... 400kB/20000 creating configuration files ... ok creating template1 database in /Library/PostgreSQL8/data/base/1 ... FATAL: could not create shared memory segment: Cannot allocate memory DETAIL: Failed system call was shmget(key=2, size=1646592, 03600). HINT: This error usually means that PostgreSQL's request for a shared memory segment exceeded available memory or swap space. To reduce the request size (currently 1646592 bytes), reduce PostgreSQL's shared_buffers parameter (currently 50) and/or its max_connections parameter (currently 10). The PostgreSQL documentation contains more information about shared memory configuration. child process exited with exit code 1 initdb: removing contents of data directory "/Library/PostgreSQL8/data" The pg docs suggest: In OS X 10.3.9 and later, instead of editing /etc/rc you may create a file named /etc/sysctl.conf, containing variable assignments such as kern.sysv.shmmax=4194304 kern.sysv.shmmin=1 kern.sysv.shmmni=32 kern.sysv.shmseg=8 kern.sysv.shmall=1024 This method is better than editing /etc/rc because your changes will be preserved across system updates. Note that all five shared-memory parameters must be set in /etc/sysctl.conf, else the values will be ignored. Beware that recent releases of OS X ignore attempts to set SHMMAX to a value that isn't an exact multiple of 4096. SHMALL is measured in 4 kB pages on this platform. In all OS X versions, you'll need to reboot to make changes in the shared memory parameters take effect. ---- Unfortunately, I got the above error (again) with the initdb command after creating the /etc/sysctl.conf file, using the values suggested above, and then rebooting. Any suggestions? Cheers! Joe