Re: Minimising windows installer password confusion

On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 1:35 PM, Kevin Grittner
<Kevin(dot)Grittner(at)wicourts(dot)gov> wrote:
> Magnus Hagander  wrote:
>> Kevin Grittner  wrote:
>
>>> Are they running the installation as a system administrator? If
>>> so, rather than throwing up an error message and telling them to
>>> go use other tools to reset the password, is it possible for the
>>> administrator account to force a password change? If that is
>>> possible, it seems like it would be a lot more friendly. If not,
>>> perhaps the old postgres user could be renamed, and a new one
>>> created with the password?
>>
>> That might break another app running nuder that account. Such as a
>> different version of PostgreSQL...

Right.

>> But an option could be to create a different account to run it
>> under, I guess... Leaving the old one where it is. I think that's
>> better than renaming the old one, really.

I'm not keen on adding additional user accounts - that's a security
problem imho. It'll leave the unaware user with multiple accounts on
the system, and may cause those that do understand what's going on
pain because they'll have to deal with multiple accounts for things
like server-side copy.

It also doesn't solve the problem during upgrades, though admittedly
that seems to be less common.

> That makes sense.  I just think we should try very hard to make the
> installer "just work" to the extent possible, rather than trying to
> direct the user in how to use system tools in the middle of the
> process.

Right - that's what always aim to do (and in fact was the number one
driver behind the current generation of installers), and provided the
user remembers their password it works just fine.

--
Dave Page
Blog: http://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake

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