hi!
I have been using postgres 9.4 and repmgr2.0 combination and been doing replication (hot standby). Now I'd like to start doing slot based replication and have installed repmgr3 and exeuted the provided sql scripts and also added use_replication_slots=1 into repmgr.conf.
The question is that what is the correct procedure to switch into using slots (max_replication_slots) in this case as the system has been set up already without them? Do I have to unregister and re-register all the standbys? Hopefully re-clone could be avoided.
What I tried was that I configured max_replication_hosts=5, restarted master, created some slots using select * from pg_create_physical_replication_slot(<name>), configured one created slot into recovery.conf in the slave. What I noticed was that replication seemed to be still working after this but in repl_nodes table slot_name remained empty. Then I did standby re-register with force and slot_name was filled with repmgr_slot_2 value which is not the name I gave for the slot. I think repmgr invented this name but in the pg_replication_slots table repmgr_slot_2 does not exist. There is only the slot I created myself (active=t). So I guess this approach is not quite right.
What if I just skip doing the re-register. Does is matter if slot_name remains empty in repl_nodes?
br,
Pekka