Hi Sam, Thanks for your help. Your solution seems to work. I may let you know if I run into problems. Thanks again. Best, Jia On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 11:31 AM, Sam Mason<sam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > [ please CC the mailing list and not the list owner, they answer > mailing list questions not PG questions ] > > On Tue, Sep 08, 2009 at 10:31:50AM -0400, Jia Chen wrote: >> Sam Mason wrote: >> >I don't think you need to go that far. I'd just do an "initdb" >> >somewhere on the removable disk and then start PG pointing at where the >> >cluster was (i.e. postgres -D /media/disk/psqldata) and all should be >> >good. I'd stay away from the official system startup scripts for PG. >> >> If I am not mistaken, the paragraph above means that I don't need to >> reinstall postgresql from source. > > Yes; these are all standard programs included with Debian/Ubuntu > packages as normal. Have a look through the man pages for: > > update-rc.d > initdb > postgres > >> >Yup, the table data is very tied to the state of transactions and >> >other "system level" information, you need to keep everything together >> >unfortunately. This is the price of having transactions with ACID >> >semantics. >> >> However, this paragraph implies that I do need to put other "system >> level" information together on the external drive. Do you mean that I >> can put it together without re-installation? If so, could you offer >> some hints on how to do that? Thanks. > > initdb creates a new PG cluster (i.e. the set of files that PG considers > to be a database). You should direct this to be run on your external > disk and then get PG running using this cluster. This is what "postgres > -D /media/disk/psqldata" does, i.e. start the postgres server. Once > it's started you can connect to it from the "normal" clients, psql, odbc > whatever you want. > > I expect all you need to run is: > > sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql-8.3 stop > sudo update-rc.d -f postgresql-8.3 remove > initdb /media/disk/psqldata > postgres -D /media/disk/psqldata > > from there on, all you need to do is to run the last line when you plug > the drive in. Before you take the drive out, just hit the normal Ctrl+C > and PG will shutdown cleanly. > > -- > Sam http://samason.me.uk/ > -- Ohio State University - Finance 248 Fisher Hall 2100 Neil Ave. Columbus, Ohio 43210 Telephone: 614-292-2979 http://www.fisher.osu.edu/~chen_1002/ -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
