The PostgreSQL 9.0 Reference Manual - Volume 3 - Server Administration Guide by The PostgreSQL Global Development Group Paperback (6"x9"), 274 pages ISBN 9781906966072 RRP £9.95 ($14.95) Sales of this book support the PostgreSQL project! Get a printed copy>>>

PostgreSQL 9.0 Reference Manual Volume 3 Buy the book here! >>> support free software

1.8.1.3 Internet address issues

PostgreSQL relies on the system's getaddrinfo function to parse IP addresses in listen_addresses, ‘pg_hba.conf’, etc. Older versions of AIX have assorted bugs in this function. If you have problems related to these settings, updating to the appropriate AIX fix level shown above should take care of it.

One user reports:

When implementing PostgreSQL version 8.1 on AIX 5.3, we periodically ran into problems where the statistics collector would “mysteriously” not come up successfully. This appears to be the result of unexpected behavior in the IPv6 implementation. It looks like PostgreSQL and IPv6 do not play very well together on AIX 5.3.

Any of the following actions “fix” the problem.

• Delete the IPv6 address for localhost:

  (as root)
  # ifconfig lo0 inet6 ::1/0 delete
  

• Remove IPv6 from net services. The file ‘/etc/netsvc.conf’ on AIX is roughly equivalent to ‘/etc/nsswitch.conf’ on Solaris/Linux. The default, on AIX, is thus:

  hosts=local,bind
  

  Replace this with:

  hosts=local4,bind4
  

  to deactivate searching for IPv6 addresses.

Warning: This is really a workaround for problems relating to immaturity of IPv6 support, which improved visibly during the course of AIX 5.3 releases. It has worked with AIX version 5.3, but does not represent an elegant solution to the problem. It has been reported that this workaround is not only unnecessary, but causes problems on AIX 6.1, where IPv6 support has become more mature.