Setting active = false has no effect on WAL streaming?

[JK Laiho]

Hi all,

I'm playing around with stopping and restarting Barman backups to understand how things work with combinations of various backup and configuration states. I've got v3.17.0 installed.

On one of my running test setups, full streaming, I set active = false. To my surprise, this had no visible effect on a running barman receive-wal process (nor its pg_receivewal child process) — both stay up over the next cron job. The documentation states this about active:

When this option is set to true (default), the server operates fully. If set to false, the server is restricted to diagnostic use only, meaning that operational commands such as backup execution or WAL archiving are temporarily disabled.

I would have expected the next run of barman cron to run something to the effect of barman receive-wal --stop, but it didn't. This might have made sense with create_slot = manual, but the server is configured with auto.

In this state, the list-processes command just skips the inactive server (despite the receive-wal process being online), but the check and list-backups commands continue to work (the checks are all green, the state is just inactive).

Is there an oversight here? The docs aren't clear about this situation. WALs are probably being streamed still, but the cron process is not operating on them, or something. Seems like list-processes ought to still work if list-backups does?