I am working off the following:
http://www.howtoforge.com/opennms_network_management

I'm at the point where I am supposed to initialize postgres database

$bin/initdb -D data/

Output:
initdb: cannot be run as root
Please log in (using, e.g., "su") as the (unprivileged) user that will
own the server process.


When I log in as su postgres and run the command I get:
initdb -D data/
The files belonging to this database system will be owned by user "postgres".
This user must also own the server process.

The database cluster will be initialized with locale en_US.UTF-8.
The default database encoding has accordingly been set to UTF8.

creating directory data ... initdb: could not create directory "data": Permission denied


Is the best way to assign user postgres the server process? If so where is it?

Thanks!

What distro are you using? The first best thing to do is stick with their
methods of installing postgres (I'm saying that w/o having looked at the
URI you presented).


Cheers,
Tink

OK ... so I went to that site and had a look. That thing is quite incomplete, and
makes strange assumptions/suggestions about postgres. Would you like to get
advice on how to make that how-to work, or how to do things properly?



Cheers,
Tink

I am using OpenSuse 10.3 and installing 1.2.9-1

I would like for things to work properly.

Oh and postgres 8.2.7

I'd have to go dig for the fixes/changes between Pg 8.2.6 and 8.2.7
but chances are you'd be better of using the rpm that OpenSuSE
provides, or get the source RPM and use that to build your own
8.2.7 package.

As for that How-To: don't worry too much about the locations they
suggest for the database files (both the executables and libs AND
the actual data) because for the libs - OpenNMS will find them via
ld.so.cache and doesn't need to know anything about where the files
are because only the RDBMS needs to touch them in the first place.

For things to work properly you'd need to tell us more about
your hardware, what physical disk layout you'll be using, and
what the expected work-load on the machine will be.



Cheers,
Tink