Danny Milosavljevic skribis: >> Sounds like postgresql died and shepherd did not notice? Or maybe it >> keeps trying to respawn it? What did /var/log/shepherd.log say? > > 2016-03-19 10:34:48 Service postgres has been started. > 2016-03-19 10:34:49 Respawning postgres. OK. >> However, daemons can usually be told to write to syslog, which is more >> appropriate than writing things to stdout/stderr anyway. > > It can always be unable to open syslog for some reason. > > If shepherd can't/doesn't redirect stderr on its own, it would be nice to have init write it somewhere and everyone else inherit it as default. Just throwing it away is not nice. Agreed. > But I agree, the chance of being able to write it to syslog is high. Btw: How does guixsd know to start the syslog service before the postgres service? Syslogd is another Shepherd service, so all we need is to express this dependency. >>What’s the right command-line/configuration option to have postgresql use syslog? > > The option is > > log_destination = 'syslog' > > in postgresql.conf > > which is generated in gnu/services/databases.scm (%default-postgres-config). Could you try this and report back?