Workaround for ident security issue

Some people, like Josh Berkus for example, claim that both trust and ident can cause the security issues with dblink. Which is true - they can. But unlike the blanket statements that they are insecure, there are ways around it.

Trust will always be insecure when dblink or similar functions are present. But there's a simple way to make ident not be insecure - just make sure that the postgres superuser does not have the same username as the OS user that runs the processes. In fact, make sure that there is no PostgreSQL user with the same username as the OS user.

initdb will make those userids the same by default, but you can change that using the -U parameter to initdb. In theory you can rename the superuser after the fact as well, but I haven't tried that so I don't know how safe it is...


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