Re: Open 7.3 items

Tom Lane wrote:
> BTW, I just thought of a small improvement to your patch that eliminates
> some of the ugliness.  Suppose that when we recognize an attempt to
> connect as a global user (ie, feature flag is on and last character of
> username is '@'), we strip off the '@' before proceeding.  Then we would
> have:
> 	global users appear in pg_shadow as foo
> 	local users appear in pg_shadow as foo@db
> and what this would mean is that you can flip between feature-enabled
> and feature-disabled states without breaking your global logins.  So you
> don't need the extra step of creating a "postgres@" before turning on
> the feature.  (Which was pretty ugly anyway, since even though postgres@
> could be made a superuser, he wouldn't be the same user as postgres ---
> this affects table ownership, for example, and would be a serious issue
> if you wanted any non-superuser global users.)
> 
> I suppose some might argue that having to say postgres@ to log in,
> when your username is really just postgres as far as you can see in the
> database, is a tad confusing.  But the whole thing is an acknowledged
> wart anyway, and I think getting rid of the two problems mentioned above
> is worth it.

Sure. If I can get one more 'yes' I will submit a new patch with the
change.  It does prevent the namespace collision without mucking up
pg_shadow.  We only need to tell people that global users need to supply
their username to the client as user@.  Is that cleaner?

> Also, if we do this then it's important to strip a trailing '@' only
> if it's the *only* one in the given username.  Else a local user
> 'foo@db1' could cheat to log into db2 by saying username = 'foo@db1@'
> with requested database db2.  But I can't see any other security hole.

Ewe, I didn't think of that.  Good point.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 359-1001
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  13 Roberts Road
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073