Let me preface this by saying that I've set up warm standby instances quite
a few times.  I think I sort of hopefully know what I'm doing.
 pg_start_backup('stuff'), tar data directory, pg_stop_backup(), copy data
directory to warm standby server, extract in data directory, etc.

We have two CentOS 5 boxes that we're trying to set up as a master -> warm
standby.  Both have postgres 8.4.4 installed from source.  The master's
postgres instance has been there for a while (a couple of months or
something).

I am very, very sorry if I'm missing something really simple, but I just
can't seem to figure out what I'm doing wrong.  Here's the process I'm
following:

==master==
$ psql
postgres=# select pg_start_backup('<today's date>')
postgres=# \q
$ cd /path/to/data/directory
$ tar cvzf data.tar.gz *
$ scp data.tar.gz <server>:~/

==warm standby==
$ cd /path/to/data/directory
$ tar xvf ~/data.tar.gz
<create recovery.conf file with restore_command line and modify
postgresql.conf to disable wal archiving>
$ pg_ctl -D /path/to/data/directory start

Here's the output after trying to start the backup instance with pg_ctl
(ignoring the line about postmaster.pid already existing):

server starting
FATAL:  incorrect checksum in control file

Here's the output from pg_controldata:

$ pg_controldata `pwd`
WARNING: Calculated CRC checksum does not match value stored in file.
Either the file is corrupt, or it has a different layout than this program
is expecting.  The results below are untrustworthy.

pg_control version number:            843
Catalog version number:               200904091
Database system identifier:           5473004134245625319
Database cluster state:               in production
pg_control last modified:             Wed 31 Dec 1969 05:00:00 PM MST
Latest checkpoint location:           B000020/0
Prior checkpoint location:            A000020/0
Latest checkpoint's REDO location:    B000020/1
Latest checkpoint's TimeLineID:       0
Latest checkpoint's NextXID:          57905/32791
Latest checkpoint's NextOID:          1
Latest checkpoint's NextMultiXactId:  0
Latest checkpoint's NextMultiOffset:  1282256808
Time of latest checkpoint:            Wed 31 Dec 1969 05:00:00 PM MST
Minimum recovery ending location:     0/4
Maximum data alignment:               0
Database block size:                  8192
Blocks per segment of large relation: 16777216
WAL block size:                       64
Bytes per WAL segment:                32
Maximum length of identifiers:        2000
Maximum columns in an index:          257
Maximum size of a TOAST chunk:        513657607
Date/time type storage:               floating-point numbers
Float4 argument passing:              by reference
Float8 argument passing:              by reference

Those timestamps are at the unix epoch - Jan 1 1970 ... what in the spinning
marble?!

Yeah.  I'm confused, my boss is confused...  We're currently running a yum
-y update on those boxes, but we'd still like to know what's going on, even
if a full update fixes everything.  Any clues?

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