So today something like 2.5 or 3 hours was spent on the SIP demo (specifically getting it installed on a laptop, and then figuring out why that didn't work). Problem is, while the demo itself is a simple set of executables with its support files all zipped up in a nice package, it still requires PostgreSQL.

No big problem except that when Bryan went to install it the dratted thing had moved forward a few minor versions and some Einstein or other decided to remove support for setups done the proper way for previous versions. You no longer can simply run the ipc-daemon2.exe. Now you MUST run it as a service, (and set an environmental variable so everything knows it's a service).

Unfortunately, the error message initdb spits out when you try to use the old method is entirely unhelpful. It doesn't say, for instance, "Couldn't connect to the IPC service, have you installed cygipc as a Windows service using cygrunsrv (this is a new configuration step introduced in version 7.4.2)" Instead it spews some cryptic debug message suggesting that IPC is malfunctioning. We wasted an hour (right before the demo) trying various combinations of installing and re-installing the cygipc and postgres packages trying to find the proper combination to load to get around the apparent incompatibility.

For future reference, to set up Cygwin PostgreSQL (though this experience is making me seriously consider only using the native ports from now on), you need to do this: