Hi Henry,
Our setup for our development and production linux boxes are:
- postgres is started by init.d scripts
- nsd is started by deamon tools.
Although now that you have brought this up it does make me think. Since deamon tools is started in init by svscan it should start earlier than postgres. But I have never thought of the race condition that you have stated since it never happened to me. I hope somebody could make a sane explation why I haven't experienced it?