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Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2019 10:20:27 -0500
From: "James Cassell" <fedoraproject@cyberpear.com>
To: "PostgreSQL Yum Package List" <pgsql-pkg-yum@lists.postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: Can we stop defaulting to 'ident'?
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On Wed, Dec 18, 2019, at 11:58 PM, Craig Ringer wrote:
> 'ident' doesn't work by default on any RPM disto.
> 
> It's not clear why the initdb wrapper for the rpm packages defaults to 
> generating 'host' entries with 'ident' auth, but I think it's pretty 
> unhelpful. At least if we used 'md5' the user could set passwords and 
> have them actually work.
> 
>  initdbcmd="$PGENGINE/initdb --pgdata='$PGDATA' --auth='ident'"
>  initdbcmd+=" $PGSETUP_INITDB_OPTIONS"
> 
> I know you can override it easily enough, but most people won't know to.
> 

For what it's worth, I am quite happy with the current default of ident.

To make it work, you can install the `authd` package, then enable the `auth.socket` systemd service.  I've made it listen only on localhost, and disabled the encryption part of authd because I didn't want to figure out how to give postgres the appropriate key.

All-in-all, it makes for a seamless auth of local users/services to their own postgres databases running on localhost.  Last I checked, ident auth was only specified for the localhost addreses in pg_hba.conf.  (RHEL 8 has marked the "authd" package as deprecated without any explanation, though... it still works fine and is still present.)


V/r,
James Cassell