I've installed PostgreSQL 9.0 on Ubuntu 10.04 using this guide.
However, when I try to start the service, I get this back, with no error or message shown.
root@srv1:/etc/init.d# ./postgresql start
* Starting PostgreSQL 9.0 database server
* The PostgreSQL server failed to start. Please check the log output.
[fail]
I don't know where the log file is to see this error. It's definitely not in /var/log/* or /var/log/postgresql
Best Answer
The issue was to do with not having write access to the log file for the 'postgres' user.
IMO, the startup script should echo an error to the screen instead of telling you to check the log that it can't even write to.