Re: Understanding the behaviour of hostname in psql

thanks for your prompt response Tom.

> Well, a connection to "localhost" will generally go to 127.0.0.1
> (*not* 127.0.1.1 --- that's just a typo from some hand hacking
> of your hosts file, I bet).  A connection to your host name will
> go to whatever the assigned "real" IP is (192.168.0.5 in your
> example).  If you don't have a stable assigned IP because you're
> using DHCP, the best advice would be to always write localhost
> and never bohr in your psql -h switch.
>
> This has nothing much to do with Postgres specifically --- it's a
> generic property of hostname lookup.

nice one, this makes perfect sense. so i cleaned up my hosts file and
my pg_hba.conf
file; also, i've restarted the machine just in case some caching is
happening somewhere.
unfortunately, the result is still not quite right:

$ psql -h 127.0.0.1 -U marco -w --dbname sanzala
psql (8.4.5)
SSL connection (cipher: DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA, bits: 256)
Type "help" for help.

[marco(at)127(dot)0(dot)0(dot)1:5432 (12:04:40) sanzala ]$ \q

$ psql -h localhost -U marco -w --dbname sanzala
psql: fe_sendauth: no password supplied

$ ping -c 1 localhost
PING localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=1 ttl=64
time=0.020 ms
<snip>

$ head -n3 /etc/hosts
192.168.0.5 bohr # Added by NetworkManager
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
::1 bohr localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6

$ grep /etc/postgresql/8.4/main/pg_hba.conf -B1 -e^host
# IPv4 local connections:
host all all 127.0.0.1/32 trust
# IPv6 local connections:
host all all ::1/128 md5

not quite sure why i still get asked for a password when i login via
localhost...

cheers
--
The key to Understanding complicated things is to know what not to
look at, and what not to compute, and what not to think. -- Abelson &
Sussman, SICP

blog: http://mcraveiro.blogspot.com