PG versus FreeBSD, startup and connections problems

Hi gang,

I just inherited a FreeBSD box, and it is horribly sick. So we moved
everything to a new machine (power supply failures) and finally got
stuff running again.

Ok, for two days (rimshot)

Here are the two problems, and for the life of me I cannot find any
documentation on either:

1) freebsd will only let PostgreSQL have 38 connections at a time,
regardless of kernel settings or postgresql.conf settings. Where
exactly (and how, exactly) does one remedy that problem?

2) As of this morning, the machine was down again, this time apache
fired up normally but pg refuses to start - without errors. When I
start with postmaster on the CLI I also get no errors, just no
postmaster. Why am I not seeing the errors, is this a FreeBSD or
PostgreSQL issue?

For example:

$ pg_ctl start
postmaster successfully started
$ pg_ctl status
pg_ctl: postmaster or postgres not running

OR:

$ postmaster -D /usr/local/pgsql/data
$
(no response)

There are no errors in /var/log/pgsql either, so I have absolutely no
idea how to troubleshoot :-(

-- Mitch