Re: How to enable remote anoymous logins? (+ admin

X-Original-To: kynn(at)panix(dot)com
Date: Mon, 27 Feb 2006 10:34:22 -0500
From: Sean Davis <sdavis2(at)mail(dot)nih(dot)gov>
Thread-Topic: [NOVICE] How to enable remote anoymous logins? (+ admin
books?)
Thread-Index: AcY7s0gDhq1azaemEdqKXgANkzVl6A==

On 2/27/06 10:21 AM, "kynn(at)panix(dot)com" <kynn(at)panix(dot)com> wrote:

>
>
>
> Hi. What must I do to enable remote anonymous logins to our
> PostgreSQL server? What determines whether a password is required?
> Is it possible to require that the password be the user's e-mail
> address? Does the server keep record of all connections?
>
> (BTW, our server is version 8.0, and runs on Linux.)
>
> As you can see, I have many questions, too many in fact! I have not
> had much luck finding good resources on *administering* a PostgreSQL
> server. Are there any good books for this? Or other resources for
> the novice dbadmin? I'm particularly interested in stuff on
> administering PostgreSQL on Linux/Unix.

If you haven't found the postgresql docs yet, they are here and are
excellent.

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0

See here for details on what you want to do:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/interactive/client-authentication.html

Thanks!

However, in short, you probably DO NOT want to make anonymous connections to
your database in most cases. What is it that you are trying to do?

I am trying go mimic the behavior of other DB servers I have used that
allow me to connect, without requiring a password, with something
like:

% mysql -h ensembldb.ensembl.org -U anonymous

Granted, all the examples I know of are, like the one shown above,
with MySQL servers, but I thought I'd be able to do the same thing
with Postgres.

Needless to say, my intention was to give the anonymous user minimal
privileges (namely, read-only queries on a specific database).

I suppose that even a user with minimal privileges could cause harm
(e.g. by submitting a very computationally demanding request). Is
this the reason for the advice against such connections, or is there
something else?

kj