Postgres backups - when the backup operator isn't the postgres user ?

From: "Chris Lidgate (Sun Edgemail)" <Chris(dot)Lidgate(at)Sun(dot)COM>
To: pgsql-novice(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Postgres backups - when the backup operator isn't the postgres user ?
Date: 2008-08-21 06:17:04
Message-ID: 48AD0860.1090703@sun.com
Views: Raw Message | Whole Thread | Download mbox | Resend email
Thread:
Lists: pgsql-novice

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000">
<font size="+1"><tt>Hi,<br>
<br>
I'm part of a team involved in creating an appliance product. We
collect data about stuff, put it in a postgres databse, and then allow
a UI to pull stuff out of the db and draw some pictures. Pretty
straightforward. Our application runs in the context of user A, and
currently our db runs in the context of postgres user B. Our
application provides login credentials to the db when we open it for
access. We did this as we thought this was 'best practice' to separate
the app user from the database user.<br>
<br>
Now we would like our application to provide automatic backups of the
db and distribute copies to remote systems, but this is where things go
wrong. We're using PITA backups where we need to tar up parts of the
$PGDATA tree, and </tt></font><font size="+1"><tt>our application user
A does not have permissions to access the postgres files that we need
to make our backups. </tt></font><br>
<font size="+1"><tt><br>
The obvious solution to me was to make our app user and our db user the
same ... it's pretty simple and will solve our problem, but I would
rather the app user not have direct access to the db files.<br>
<br>
<br>
</tt></font><br>
<font size="+1"><tt>This seems a simple and common enough scenario tho'
- someone must have faced this before and come up with a good solution.
Any pointers ?<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
-- Chris<br>
</tt></font>
</body>
</html>

Attachment Content-Type Size
unknown_filename text/html 1.5 KB

Responses

Browse pgsql-novice by date

  From Date Subject
Next Message Andrej Ricnik-Bay 2008-08-21 06:22:14 Re: Postgres backups - when the backup operator isn't the postgres user ?
Previous Message Martijn van Oosterhout 2008-08-20 20:16:21 Re: Fwd: Restarting with pg_ctl, users, and passwords.