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From: Laurenz Albe <laurenz.albe@cybertec.at>
To: Robert Treat <rob@xzilla.net>
To: David G. Johnston <david.g.johnston@gmail.com>
Cc: Euler Taveira <euler@eulerto.com>
Cc: Theodor Herlo <t.herlo@proventa.de>
Cc: pgsql-docs@lists.postgresql.org <pgsql-docs@lists.postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: Documentation for initdb option --waldir
Date: Sat, 29 Mar 2025 17:26:14 +0100
Message-ID: <990b0bfa9ad2e68c517c3d5a29c48d37758877a1.camel@cybertec.at> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAJSLCQ3J31T0VrKZ+Ad1qBvECmEFByfY5JrJ6z2bX=8OnN+GZg@mail.gmail.com>
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On Sat, 2025-03-29 at 10:26 -0400, Robert Treat wrote:
> "Best practice is to create a directory within the mount-point
> directory that is owned by the PostgreSQL user, and then create the
> data directory within that. This avoids permissions problems,..."
> 
> Which I do remember having tried to do it directly and the OS
> complaining that my mount point wasn't owned by root and/or Postgres
> complaining that the xlog dir wasn't owned by Postgres, so I think
> this advice probably still holds.

The root directory of a file system, which will be mounted at the
mount point, should be owned by root.

As far as I know, the reason is that it contains a "lost+found"
directory, which is used by file system checks to put orphaned
files.  If a non-root user owned the mount point, the user could
remove that directory, which would be a bad idea.

On the other hand, PostgreSQL will protest if the directory isn't
empty...

Yours,
Laurenz Albe





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