Re: Bad error message on valuntil

On 06/07/2013 11:57 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
> "Joshua D. Drake" <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> writes:
>> I had a customer pulling their hair out today because they couldn't
>> login to their system. The error was consistently:
>
>> 2013-06-07 08:42:44 MST postgres 10.1.11.67 27440 FATAL: password
>> authentication failed for user "user
>
>> However the problem had nothing to do with password authentication. It
>> was because the valuntil on the user had been set till a date in the
>> past. Now technically if we just removed the word "password" from the
>> error it would be accurate but it seems it would be better to say,
>> "FATAL: the user "user" has expired".
>
> I think it's intentional that we don't tell the *client* that level of
> detail.

Why? That seems rather silly.

> I could see emitting a log message about it, but it's not clear
> whether that will help an unsophisticated user.

This is not an unsophisticated user. They tried resetting the password,
even changing the username to lowercase in case it was some weird
folding issue. Granted they didn't check pg_user but then again, I
didn't at first either because, well the error was rather obvious until
it wasn't.

Sincerely,

JD

>
> regards, tom lane
>
>

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