Re: Post-installation questions

On Sat, Apr 12, 2008 at 03:05:41PM +0000, william wayne wrote:
> This is a newbie question as I have not used the product before. After
> installation of PG 8.2 I noticed that I have 2 servers: postgresql
> database server 8.2 (localhost:5432) and another one differing only
> in the name (the second one is 8.3).

8.3 is the latest series of Postgres and if you're doing something new
it would probably be good to use it. The 8.2 series is the last stable
series and will be maintained (i.e. bugs fixed) for a few years yet, but
isn't quite as fast or featureful as 8.3.

> The problem is that I did not
> request the 8.3 during installation. Based in the instructions I
> downloaded from the internet (admittedly the instructions applied
> to PG 8.0) I should have only had one server after the install. In
> addition, the PG 8.2 has a username of postgrestest (I did not do this
> during installation) and I cannot logon to the server because I do not
> know the password (I did not set one up).

This tends to depend on the distribution you're using. They all seem to
do subtly different things when creating an initial database cluster,
and authentication is one part of it. There will be a "pg_hba.conf"
file that controls the authentication process, and it's described in the
manual[1].

Normally "local" (i.e. not over the network) login uses the same
user/role name in PG as you're currently logged into the computer as.
You could try "su"ing to "postgrestest" and seeing if you can get in
then.

> Also the documentation I
> am reading provides instructions for setting up Users (it has a User
> node under the server in the documentation) but the PG 8.3 has what it
> calls "Login Roles(1)".

Users and Roles are very similar and all the old commands for dealing
with users should still be there and automatically do the appropriate
thing.

If you don't get far, can you post the exact commands you're running and
their responses and we may be able to help more.

Hope that helps,
Sam

[1] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/auth-pg-hba-conf.html