> When shutting the database engines down, the associated "slon"
> processes tend to exit too.
>
> My preference is that when the database is stopped/started (or
> during a network outage) that the daemon remains running, and
> attempts periodic reconnects.
>
> What is the suggested approach for managing the daemon processes
> so that replication starts up again when the database becomes
> available?

There's a watchdog process written in Perl in the "altperl" directory
(recent CVS, whether for STABLE or for HEAD) that has some capability to
do this.

What is unfortunate is that the case where the DBMS shuts down uncleanly
is the very case where slon's won't restart cleanly because there are
liable to be old entries lying around in pg_listener.  This mandates
running a bit of slonik to reset the nodes that were affected.

In 1.0.3, the slon startup process has an automatic cleanup of old
notifications, which should resolve this issue.

You might want to look up the "slony_watchdog2.pl" script, in any case...