Hi. I think postgresql is an incredible piece of software, I am learning how to use it all the time. I ran into a nasty situation where 1 out of my 3 postgresql machines could not get any stats logged at all. I did some research and found out why, but it also led me to believe maybe a new feature can be added in.
I suggest you add a postgresql.conf option that lets you pick IPv4 or IPV6 for the stats buffer daemon. Now, the stats collector daemon does not use TCP/IP. The Stats buffer daemon DOES. Run sockstat, run fstat -p, map the stat buffer collector. It picks a random UDP port to listen on, and the localhost interface. On my FreeBSD 4.8-REL-p3 machine it picked an IPv6 address. Here is some background on why UDP was picked. Look for Jan Wieck's response. http://dbforums.com/arch/171/2003/9/906823 Now, it can randomly pick IPv4 or IPv6. I think this is not necessarily a good thing. If I want to harden a machine, I want to at least focus on IPv4 or IPv6, so I can write firewall rules accordingly and such. It was not clear in the documentation that the stats buffer daemon would randomly pick IPv4 or IPv6. Why is this an issue at all? Well, I ran into a nasty bug with FreeBSD (or feature). Where if I enabled IPV4 Firewall in the kernel with default deny settings, for some odd reason it appears that it also blocks IPV6 packets even though I did not enable it in the kernel. The side effect was, it blocked all IPv6 packets, even to the localhost. Yet, there was no way to configure it since the kernel did not have IPv6 firewall enabled. In short, the firewall was blocking for IPv6, but did not let me change it's behavior. Of course if I recompile the kernel to add IPv6 firewalls and wrote the rules to let it pass I am sure it would work, but for other reasons I could not do that now. I think it would be nice to let me pick IPv4 or IPv6 for the bindings. A lot of other daemons do it too, like SSHD. I do not think it would be too hard and later on if IPv6 even takes off, at least things will be more controllable and sensible. Or, in the least, could you document that the stats buffer daemon requires the use of communication to the localhost as of now, through IPv6. It would be really helpful for anyone else who runs into this issue. Thanks and keep up the good work! -Carroll Kong ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: subscribe and unsubscribe commands go to [EMAIL PROTECTED]