I am a newbie tasked with setting up a warm standby server. I have questions about log file content.

Here is my restore command:
restore_command = 'pg_standby -d /opt/novell/idm/Postgres/data/archives %f %p %r 2>>standby.log'

When I restart the server, the screen displays:
waiting for server to start............................................. ..................could not start server
PostgreSQL 8.4 did not start in a timely fashion, please see /opt/novell/idm/Postgres/data/pg_log/startup.log for details

The startup log reads:
2012-01-21 23:37:53 CST LOG: could not create IPv6 socket: Address family not supported by protocol

ps aux shows:
postgres 11764 0.0 0.1 84476 5092 ? S Jan21 0:00 /opt/novell/idm/Postgres/bin/postgres -D /opt/novell/idm/Postgres/data
postgres 11771 0.0 0.0 47276 1284 ? Ss Jan21 0:00 postgres: logger process
postgres 11775 0.0 0.0 84476 1408 ? Ss Jan21 0:00 postgres: startup process waiting for 000000020000000000000002
postgres 11817 0.0 0.0 43904 1604 ? S Jan21 0:00 pg_standby /opt/novell/idm/Postgres/data/archives 000000020000000000000002 pg_xlog/RECOVERYXLOG 000000000000000000000000

postgresql-date.log shows:
2012-01-22 00:21:23 CST FATAL: the database system is starting up

I understand the presence of recovery.conf prevents normal startup. Are these entries normal in the presence of recovery.conf?

The solution is working now.