Troubleshooting Puppet PostgreSQL Locale Mismatches

I’ve been doing some work lately with VMware Hyperic Server and Puppet, and I’ve been having issues where the Puppet Labs PostgreSQL module refuses to create a PostgreSQL database for me. I try to call it with: class { ‘postgresql’: charset => ‘UTF8’, }-> class { ‘postgresql::server’: config_hash => { ‘listen_addresses’ => ‘127.0.0.1’, ‘manage_redhat_firewall’ => true, ‘postgres_password’ => ‘goatsaresupercool’, }, require => Mount[‘/var/lib/pgsql’], } postgresql::db { ‘HQ’: user => ‘hyperic’, password => ‘sheeparecooltoo’, require => Class[‘postgresql::server’], } …and it throws this error into Puppet’s output: Error: /usr/bin/initdb –encoding ‘UTF8’ –pgdata ‘/var/lib/pgsql/data’ returned 1 instead of one of [0] “No problem,” I said. Since Puppet is kind enough to give me the command it’s trying I switched to the postgres user …

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Who Cares About Time Zones Anyway?

If you think you have a thankless job you should think about Arthur David Olson and Paul Eggert. Heck, it’s not even a paying job for them. They’re volunteers. Perhaps even masochists. What do they do? They maintain the time zone database (“zoneinfo”) for all of the computing world. And while residents of a particular country have to put up with just the general stupidity of their own politicians, these guys have to put up with all the stupidity of all politicians, across the Earth. Every time a politician in Russia, or Cameroon, or Indiana thinks it’d be a good idea to screw with the clocks these guys update and redistribute their database[0]. Vendors pick up the update and send …

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