Hi. We are looking into the possibility of running a Postgres server on an underutilized machine. This machine has very little local disk space, so we would have to create the data directory on a shared file system. The underutilized machine was set up so that it can *only read* from the shared file system, i.e., cannot write to the shared file system. Is it possible to create a database cluster on a machine that has write access to the shared file system, shut down the Postgres server on that machine, and then start up the Postgres server on the machine that cannot write to the shared file system, and thereafter, *only query* the database. Since Postgres writes the postmaster.pid file to the data directory (which would be on the shared file system), the answer would appear to be no, since the 'underutilized' machine cannot write any files to the shared file system. Would it be possible to write the postmaster.pid file to the local file system on the 'underutilized' machine even though the data directory is on the shared file system? I realize that this seems like a bad idea - given that the purpose of the postmaster.pid file as I understand it is to prevent more than one postmaster running in a data directory - but I wanted to ask whether this is a possibility. Even if it were possible to write the postmaster.pid to the local file system on the 'underutilized' machine, does Postgres write other temporary files even if only SELECT statements are being executed against the database? And where does it write those files - in subdirectories of the data directory? Thank you, Janet -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
