Re: Why IDENT doesn't work with JDBC

Ian Pilcher wrote:
> Oliver Jowett wrote:
>
>>
>> I'd guess that both IPV6 and authentication via ident-over-TCP are not
>> particularly common.
>
> Did you read the bug?

Yes, I did.

> Java 1.4.2+ *always* uses IPv6 on Linux, unless
> you tell it not to.

Or unless IPv6 kernel support is not present.

> AFAIK, all recent Linux distributions ship with
> IPv6 turned on, so it's present even if there isn't an external IPv6
> network.

None of the Linux boxes here have IPv6 enabled. If you're compiling a
custom kernel, and you don't have a physical IPv6 network, why would you
enable IPv6?

> As far as ident-over-TCP, it's the only way to do it with JDBC. For my
> money, it beats the heck out of storing your database password in your
> web application!

It's not particularly useful if you have anything other than a N:1
mapping between system users and database users, though. The setups I
have seen either use localhost trust, or md5 + password on the client
app. ident doesn't seem too common.

So you need all of: recent JVM, IPv6-enabled kernel, buggy ident server,
and pg_hba.conf that uses 'ident'. It's not too surprising that noone
else appears to have hit this combination before. To answer your
original question: yes, apparently you *are* the only one using that
combination.

Anyway, thanks for the report and workaround, it's good to get that
information into the archives. There doesn't seem to be anything that
postgresql or the JDBC driver can do about the problem, though.

-O