Re: Application name patch - v4

On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 11:47 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Dave Page <dpage@pgadmin.org> writes:
>> Updated application name patch, including a GUC assign hook to clean
>> the application name of any unsafe characters, per discussion.
>
> Applied with assorted editorialization.  There were a couple of
> definitional issues that I don't recall if we had consensus on:
>
> 1. The patch prevents non-superusers from seeing other users'
> application names in pg_stat_activity.  This seems at best pretty
> debatable to me.  Yes, it supports usages in which you want to put
> security-sensitive information into the appname, but at the cost of
> disabling (perfectly reasonable) usages where you don't.  If we made
> the app name universally visible, people simply wouldn't put security
> sensitive info in it, the same as they don't put it on the command line.
> Should we change this?

Uh, yeah, I guess. That wasn't a concious decision, more a copy n
paste inherited 'feature'.

> (While I'm looking at it, I wonder why client_addr and client_port
> are similarly hidden.)
>
> 2. I am wondering if we should mark application_name as
> GUC_NO_RESET_ALL.  As-is, the value sent at libpq initialization
> will be lost during RESET ALL, which would probably surprise people.
> On the other hand, not resetting it might surprise other people.
> If we were able to send it in the startup packet then this wouldn't
> be a problem, but we are far from being able to do that.

In the use cases I envisage for this, the appname is more a property
of the connection than the session, thus I wouldn't expect it to
change following a RESET ALL. That said, one could then argue that it
should RESET to the connection-time value...

I think we should use GUC_NO_RESET_ALL.

-- 
Dave Page
EnterpriseDB UK: http://www.enterprisedb.com