Starting a Postgres slave that is in hotstandy - stuck after start I have a postgres 9.1 hot-standby that has been down for a few days and having problems starting back up. When I try to restart the server I see the following:

-sh-4.1$ /usr/local/pgsql/bin/pg_ctl start -D /usr/local/pgsql/data
server starting
-sh-4.1$ LOG:  database system was shut down in recovery at 2013-02-13 05:11:29 UTC
LOG:  entering standby mode
cp: cannot stat `/usr/local/pgsql/wals/000000010000003B000000BA': No such file or directory
LOG:  redo starts at 3B/BA0022E0
LOG:  record with zero length at 3B/BA820590
cp: cannot stat `/usr/local/pgsql/wals/000000010000003B000000BA': No such file or directory
LOG:  streaming replication successfully connected to primary


What does this mean? Why isn't the standby getting the data it needs from the master and making itself available? Any suggestions on how to diagnose and resolve? Thanks
Although this message could look like an error:


  cp: cannot stat `/usr/local/pgsql/wals/000000010000003B000000BA': No
  such file or directory


it's actually harmless, it's just the way of your restore_command to check for a new WAL file that's not necessarily there yet.
Presumably this command looks like:

cp /usr/local/pgsql/wals/%f "%p"


Should you want to get rid of that message, you could provide a more sophisticated version of the command to silently check for the existence of the file before attempting to copy it.

In the rest of the log output, there is nothing that looks wrong. If it's a hot standby, you should be able to connect to it with psql.