Hi,

I'm running postgresql 9.6 on a Red Hat 7 system and have created my own service script to start and stop the instance(-s).
When I run systemctl stop postgresql-tst.service the service is stopped as expected. But when I run systemctl status postgresql-tst.service is starts it up again. That is not what I want: I just want it to give me the status which is stopped. Can someone tell me if this is expected behaviour on Red Hat 7?

Thanks in advance.
Regards,
Marian

systemctl status should display the status, not start the service. The behaviour you observe is not expected.

If you want help to understand why it behaves like this, share the service definition.

By the way, Red Hat 7 is very old and doesn’t use systemd. I suspect you run RHEL 7.

Hi,

This is what my service script looks like:
cat /usr/lib/systemd/system/postgresql-tst.service
[Unit]
Description=postgresql_postgres-tst
After=syslog.target
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=forking
User=postgres
Group=postgres
Environment=PGDATA=/data/postgres-tst/data-01/
# Run ExecStartPre with root-permissions
PermissionsStartOnly=true
ExecStartPre=/bin/chown postgresostgres /var/run/postgresql

ExecStart=/usr/pgsql-9.6/bin/pg_ctl start -D ${PGDATA}
ExecStop=/usr/pgsql-9.6/bin/pg_ctl stop -D ${PGDATA} -s -m fast
ExecReload=/usr/pgsql-9.6/bin/pg_ctl reload -D ${PGDATA} -s
Restart=on-failure
KillMode=control-group
ExecStop=/bin/kill -SIGTERM $MAINPID
RestartSec=10s

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Thanks in advance.
regards
Marian

Hmmm I don’t see a problem. Though admittedly I don’t know whether the PostgreSQL commands are correct.

What makes you think the systemctl status command starts the service, and not something else? What do you see in the service’s journal?

By the way, please use code tags to format code and command output so that it’s readable. See my signature.

this is near impossible - unless your systemctl binary is masked by something of the same name in $HOME/bin, for example.
you must have misunderstood something, or simple typed it wrong.

Are you sure it's not just restarting when it is stopped? I note this:
If that's happening, a stop followed by a status would show it was running...

The man page says

Ahh. I'm still learning 'bout systemd...

Thank you.