Re: Hostnames in pg_hba.conf

On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 17:21, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> Bart Samwel <bart(at)samwel(dot)tk> writes:
> > I've been working on a patch to add hostname support to pg_hba.conf.
>
> Have you read the previous discussions about that?
>

Yes, mostly.

The previous discussions included all sorts of complex stuff such as
wildcards. Personally, I'd think that in the cases where you'd want
wildcards, then you should use IP / netmask configuration, because that's a
way better indicator of "something that comes from the same source network
entity". For instance, wildcards are nice for "all our own servers", except
that you'd normally use IP / netmaks to indicate your own server subnet.

The way I see it, hostname based configuration should be plain and simple.
You suggested in one of the earlier discussions that it should not be much
more than removing the AI_NUMERICHOST hint in the lookup. My current
solution is slightly more involved, since it performs the by-hostname lookup
at check time, not at pg_hba.conf read time -- but there is not much more
complexity involved. If there is a case for more complexity, then we will
hear the actual use cases after this basic support is added, I guess.

Cheers,
Bart