Can not connect to PostgreSQL listening on port 5432

This issue comes from installing the postgres package without a version number. Although postgres will be installed and it will be the correct version, the script to setup the cluster will not run correctly; it's a packaging issue.

If you're comfortable with postgres there is a script you can run to create this cluster and get postgres running. However, there's an easier way.

First purge the old postgres install, which will remove everything of the old installation, including databases, so back up your databases first.. The issue currently lies with 9.1 so I will assume that's what you have installed

sudo apt-get remove --purge postgresql-9.1

Now simply reinstall

sudo apt-get install postgresql-9.1

Note the package name with the version number. HTH.

The error message refers to a Unix-domain socket, so you need to tweak your netstat invocation to not exclude them. So try it without the option -t:

netstat -nlp | grep 5432

I would guess that the server is actually listening on the socket /tmp/.s.PGSQL.5432 rather than the /var/run/postgresql/.s.PGSQL.5432 that your client is attempting to connect to. This is a typical problem when using hand-compiled or third-party PostgreSQL packages on Debian or Ubuntu, because the source default for the Unix-domain socket directory is /tmp but the Debian packaging changes it to /var/run/postgresql.

Possible workarounds:

• Use the clients supplied by your third-party package (call /opt/djangostack-1.3-0/postgresql/bin/psql). Possibly uninstall the Ubuntu-supplied packages altogether (might be difficult because of other reverse dependencies).
• Fix the socket directory of the third-party package to be compatible with Debian/Ubuntu.
• Use -H localhost to connect via TCP/IP instead.
• Use -h /tmp or equivalent PGHOST setting to point to the right directory.
• Don't use third-party packages.