I ran into so problems and lack of information with my last post on this topic. Firstly my syntax for

local all all to local all all ident devel

doesn’t seem to work in my current setup. It’s possible that it has something to do with the configuration of the Debian/Ubuntu server I was basing that against, and now my targets are Arch Linux and Slackware.

So our goal here will be to provide an alternate user that can log in as postgres via ident. why would you want to do this? maybe you’re tired of su - to the postgres unix user after logging in as your administrative user (root?).

First we need to open our pg_ident.conf and add the following line.

admin root postgres

So as I said in the last post on this: “admin” is an arbitrary identifier, root is the system user, and postgres is the database user. Now let’s go ahead and make sure the postgres system user can still login.

admin postgres postgres

ok that’s all we need to do in the pg_ident.conf. Go ahead and open pg_hba.conf and add this line above the default 3 lines in the file.

local all postgres ident map=admin

as a breakdown: local is for socket connections, all means all databases, ident means it’s checking for local users, and map=admin says look at the users in the admin identifier in pg_ident.conf.

Now you should be able to run psql dname postgres as root. You will not be able to use the db postgres user as any system user not in the admin map.