First off, I'm new to Vagrant and Postgres.

I created my Vagrant instance using http://files.vagrantup.com/lucid32.box with out any trouble. I am able to run vagrant up and vagrant ssh with out issue.

I followed the instructions http://blog.crowdint.com/2011/08/11/postgresql-in-vagrant.html with one minor alteration. I installed "postgresql-8.4-postgis" package instead of "postgresql postgresql-contrib"

I started the server using:

postgres@lucid32:/home/vagrant$ /etc/init.d/postgresql-8.4 start

While connected to the vagrant instance I can use psql to connect to the instance with out issue.

In my Vagrantfile I had already added: config.vm.forward_port 5432, 5432

but when I try to run psql from localhost I get:

psql: could not connect to server: Connection refused
    Is the server running locally and accepting
    connections on Unix domain socket "/tmp/.s.PGSQL.5432"?

I'm sure I am missing something simple. Any ideas?

Update:

I found a reference to an issue like this and the article suggested using:

psql -U postgres -h localhost

with that I get:

psql: server closed the connection unexpectedly
    This probably means the server terminated abnormally
    before or while processing the request.