Hello, Nowadays, PostgreSQL is often used behind proxies. Some are PostgreSQL protocol aware (Pgpool, PgBouncer), some are pure TCP (HAProxy). From the database instance point of view, all clients come from the proxy.
There are two major problems with this topology: * It neutralizes the host based authentication. Every client shares the same source. Either we allow this source or not but we cannot allow clients on a more fine-grained basis, or not by the IP address. * It makes debugging harder. If we have a DDL or a slow query logged, we cannot use the source to identify who is responsible. On one hand, we can move the authentication and logging mechanisms to PostgreSQL based proxies but they will never be as complete as PostgreSQL itself. And they don't have features like HTTP health checks to redirect trafic to nodes (health, role, whatever behind the URL). On the other hand, those features are not implemented at all because they don't know the PostgreSQL protocol, they simply forward requests. In the HTTP reverse proxies world, there's a "dirty hack" to identify the source IP address: add an HTTP header "X-Forwared-For" to the request. It's the destination duty to do whatever they want with this information. With this feature in mind, someone from HAProxy has implemented this mechanism at the protocol level. It's called the PROXY protocol. With this piece of logic at the beginning of the protocol, we could implement a totally transparent proxy and benefit from the great features of PostgreSQL regarding clients. Note that MariaDB support the PROXY protocol in MaxScale (proxy) and MariaDB Server in recent versions. My question is, what do you think of this feature? Is it worth to spend time implementing it in PostgreSQL or not? Links: - http://www.haproxy.org/download/1.8/doc/proxy-protocol.txt - https://mariadb.com/kb/en/library/proxy-protocol-support/ Thanks, Julien PS: I've already sent this message to a wrong mailing list. Stephen Frost said it's implemented in pgbouncer but all I can find is an open issue: https://github.com/pgbouncer/pgbouncer/issues/241.
