I am a newbie tasked with setting up a warm standby server.

Here is the restore command that I am using:

restore_command = 'pg_standby -d /opt/novell/idm/Postgres/data/archives %f %p %r 2>>standby.log'

I can see that pg_standby makes use of the history file created in pg_xlog. I copied that file to /opt/novell/idm/Postgres/data/archives, the directory that contains the archives copied from the production server. I did not change the content. Here is the content:

1 000000010000000000000002 before transaction 0 at 1999-12-31 18:00:00-06

The production logs begin with 00000001000000000000001A and go up from there. About 90 logs have accumulated. My standby.log shows:
Waiting for WAL file : 000000020000000000000002
That file is in the pg_xlog file on the standby server. It is not correct for the production server log sequence. Will changing the content of the .history log fix this? Should I edit that file?

The solution was to kill off all postgres related pids and restart.