Re: Silent failure with invalid hba_file setting

On tis, 2011-10-18 at 18:38 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> > The problem with this is you cannot get into the database as it acts
> > as if it did find the hba file but found it empty.
> 
> Well, an actually empty pg_hba.conf file would have the same problem,
> and it's pretty hard to see any situation where it would be useful to
> start the postmaster and not let it accept any connections.  Should we
> add a check to consider it an error if the file doesn't contain at least
> one HBA record?

If you try to connect and it doesn't find a record, it will tell you.

I wouldn't add extra special checks for that.  It might not be
completely unreasonable to have a standby that no one can connect to,
for example.