On Aug 3, 2013, at 24:04, BladeOfLight16 <bladeofligh...@gmail.com> wrote:

> My big concern as I've been reading this thread is whether users are cluster 
> specific or installation specific. If they're cluster specific, he'll need to 
> know credentials for his original cluster anyway to get the data, unless he 
> can do some kind of password reset.

They are cluster specific, as the roles are stored in the database. If you 
switch between different data directories, that means you're switching the 
available roles as well. And their details, such as passwords. You're also 
switching between configurations, such as pg_hba.conf.

Where it gets confusing a bit here is that there's usually also an OS postgres 
user, but that user is used to run the postgres server/service with limited 
credentials and not to log into the database. On Windows, apparently postgres 
is run under a standard network service account instead, which serves the same 
purpose.

Now, if you connect to the database without specifying a role-name to connect 
as, the standard tools (psql, pg_dump, etc. Don't know about pgAdmin) take your 
user account name and try to use that for the database login role, making it 
look like there's a relation between OS users and database users, but that's 
not actually the case (although there's an authentication option in pg_hba.conf 
to require such a relation).

At least, this is how I think it works. If I'm wrong someone will no doubt 
correct me ;)

Alban Hertroys
--
If you can't see the forest for the trees,
cut the trees and you'll find there is no forest.



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