Re: Open 7.3 items

On Wed, 2002-08-14 at 14:34, Tom Lane wrote:
> Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> writes:
> > Oh, so try it with and without.  I can do that, but it seems more of a
> > security problem where you were trying two names instead of one.  Do
> > people like that?
> 
> The nice thing about it is you can have any combination of people with
> installation-wide access (create them as joeblow) and people with
> one-database access (create them as joeblow@joesdatabase).  A special
> case for only the postgres user is much less flexible.
> 
> > It is easy to do, except for the fact we have to
> > match pg_hba.conf with a username, though we could do the double-test
> > there too, if that isn't too weird.
> 
> It'd probably be better to first look at the flat-file copy of pg_shadow
> to determine whether user or user@database is the form to use, and then
> run through pg_hba.conf only once using the correct form.  Otherwise
> there are going to be all sorts of weird corner cases: user might match
> a different pg_hba row than user@database does.
> 
> Also, if you do it this way then the substitution only has to be done in
> one place: you can pass down the correct form to the backend, which'd
> otherwise have to repeat the test to see which username is found.

If there is a global 'user', then a database specific 'user@database'
should be rejected shouldn't it?  Otherwise we wind up with two
potential 'user@database' users (globals users are really user@<each
database>) but with a single ID.