Re: problem connecting via ODBC when unicode (now in correct forum.).

On Friday 21 January 2011 2:17:00 pm Tom Lane wrote:
> Adrian Klaver <adrian(dot)klaver(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> > I believe the problem, as Hiroshi Saito pointed out, is that the client
> > encoding is being set on Windows before the connection is attempted and
> > that it is picking the wrong one. Per his post pgAdmin and JDBC are
> > probably just starting with UTF8 and that is why they succeed. At this
> > point I don't know how to get around that.
>
> AFAIK the only way to get the mentioned error message (about "no
> pg_hba.conf entry") from this kind of problem is if the DBA is listing
> user names directly in pg_hba.conf. Since there is no encoding
> conversion active this early in backend startup, non-ASCII user names can
> only work if the encoding used in pg_hba.conf matches what is arriving
> from the client.

In the message(s) that went private was the pg_hba.conf. It did have some
specific usernames.

>
> Possible solution: make *two* (or more) entries in pg_hba.conf, one in
> each encoding that clients might be using. This is probably
> unmaintainable though, particularly when using Windows editors which are
> almost certainly going to think they know more than you do about
> encodings.
>
> Better idea: refrain from mentioning specific usernames in pg_hba.conf.
> Usually, anything you might want to do that way can be done better in
> other ways. For instance, make use of the CONNECT privilege if you're
> running a release new enough to have it.

When I tested I used 'all' for users to get around the above problem. It got me
past the no pg_hba.conf entry problem.

>
> By and large, though, non-ASCII user names are going to be problematic
> anyway --- even if you got past the pg_hba.conf check, I think you might
> just get a "no such user" failure when the client sends the name in an
> encoding that doesn't match what's in the system catalog. This is an
> area that's known to need work.

What I saw, for the record, in the Windows error message was:
FATAL:password authentication failed for user "?"

>
> regards, tom lane

--
Adrian Klaver
adrian(dot)klaver(at)gmail(dot)com