Re: Can we stop defaulting to 'ident'?

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