Postgresql startup failure - postgresql

Question

I'm attempting to build a box via Fabric on Openstack. Part of the install involves installing and running PostgreSQL.
This command works fine:
$ sudo service postgresql initdb
This command fails:
$ sudo service postgresql start
Log output of failure shows no issues when I run this command:
$ cat /var/lib/pgsql/pgstartup.log
This command shows the following messages:
$ cat /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_log/postgresql-Wed.log
LOG: could not open configuration file
"/var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf": Permission denied
FATAL: could not load pg_hba.conf
My user while executing these commands has the following groups:
vagrant, wheel
My user is in the sudoers list under /etc/sudoers with these permissions:
vagrant ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
perms on pgsql:
[root#integration ~]# ls -ltr /var/lib/pgsql/
total 12
drwx------. 2 postgres postgres 4096 Sep 13 2012 backups
-rw-------. 1 postgres postgres 1152 Jun 19 20:17 pgstartup.log
drwx------. 12 postgres postgres 4096 Jun 19 20:19 data
and sub dir data:
[root#integration ~]# ls -ltr /var/lib/pgsql/data/
total 76
-rw-------. 1 postgres postgres 4 Jun 19 20:17 PG_VERSION
drwx------. 2 postgres postgres 4096 Jun 19 20:17 pg_twophase
drwx------. 2 postgres postgres 4096 Jun 19 20:17 pg_tblspc
drwx------. 2 postgres postgres 4096 Jun 19 20:17 pg_stat_tmp
drwx------. 4 postgres postgres 4096 Jun 19 20:17 pg_multixact
-rw-------. 1 postgres postgres 16886 Jun 19 20:17 postgresql.conf
-rw-------. 1 postgres postgres 1631 Jun 19 20:17 pg_ident.conf
drwx------. 3 postgres postgres 4096 Jun 19 20:17 pg_xlog
drwx------. 2 postgres postgres 4096 Jun 19 20:17 pg_subtrans
drwx------. 2 postgres postgres 4096 Jun 19 20:17 pg_clog
drwx------. 5 postgres postgres 4096 Jun 19 20:17 base
drwx------. 2 postgres postgres 4096 Jun 19 20:17 global
-rw-------. 1 postgres postgres 241 Jun 19 20:17 pg_hba.conf
drwx------. 2 postgres postgres 4096 Jun 19 20:17 pg_log
-rw-------. 1 postgres postgres 57 Jun 19 20:19 postmaster.opts

Answer 1

This turned out to be an selinux issue.
I disabled it and was well. Full config below.
For those of you that arent up on selinux (like me until today) the config can be found in:
/etc/selinux/config
It can also be turned off temporarily like this:
echo 0 > /selinux/enforce
Full config
[root#integration selinux]# cat config
# This file controls the state of SELinux on the system.
# SELINUX= can take one of these three values:
# enforcing - SELinux security policy is enforced.
# permissive - SELinux prints warnings instead of enforcing.
# disabled - SELinux is fully disabled.
SELINUX=enforcing
# SELINUXTYPE= type of policy in use. Possible values are:
# targeted - Only targeted network daemons are protected.
# strict - Full SELinux protection.