Re: SSL (patch 3)

Bear Giles <bgiles(at)coyotesong(dot)com> writes:
>> What happens if I don't want to use this feature

> Use SSH tunnels. The code is written with the presumption that
> anyone using SSL wants a secure session, and that includes
> confidentiality, message integrity and endpoint authentication.
> If they just want confidentiality, SSH tunnels are a lot easier
> to set up.

Um ... I've taken that tack in the past, and every time I have, other
people have asserted that SSH tunnels are hard or impossible to set up
in their environments (eg, they're running Windows clients, don't want
to grant users shell accounts on the db server, etc). Got to listen
to the customers.

I think it would be a mistake to make usage of SSL for simple comsec
significantly harder to set up than it is now. People who want to have
authentication and so on can be told how to do it right, but don't force
your views of the right way to do things on everyone.

>> What exactly is the "problem" you identify? I couldn't make it out.

> If the SSL negotiations don't complete for any reason, the server
> hiccups. This would tend to annoy other users who see their connections
> drop, especially if some jerk is running a program that retries to
> establish a connection every 10 seconds or so.

Isn't that fixed as of 7.2? We don't do SSL negotiations in the
postmaster anymore.

regards, tom lane