Re: How to enable remote anoymous logins? (+ admin

   X-Original-To: kynn@panix.com
   Date: Mon, 27 Feb 2006 10:34:22 -0500
   From: Sean Davis <sdavis2@mail.nih.gov>
   Thread-Topic: [NOVICE] How to enable remote anoymous logins? (+ admin
    books?)
   Thread-Index: AcY7s0gDhq1azaemEdqKXgANkzVl6A==




   On 2/27/06 10:21 AM, "kynn@panix.com" <kynn@panix.com> wrote:

   >
   >
   >
   > Hi.  What must I do to enable remote anonymous logins to our
   > PostgreSQL server?  What determines whether a password is required?
   > Is it possible to require that the password be the user's e-mail
   > address?  Does the server keep record of all connections?
   >
   > (BTW, our server is version 8.0, and runs on Linux.)
   >
   > As you can see, I have many questions, too many in fact!  I have not
   > had much luck finding good resources on *administering* a PostgreSQL
   > server.  Are there any good books for this?  Or other resources for
   > the novice dbadmin?  I'm particularly interested in stuff on
   > administering PostgreSQL on Linux/Unix.

   If you haven't found the postgresql docs yet, they are here and are
   excellent.

   http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0

   See here for details on what you want to do:

   http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/interactive/client-authentication.html

Thanks!

   However, in short, you probably DO NOT want to make anonymous connections to
   your database in most cases.  What is it that you are trying to do?



I am trying go mimic the behavior of other DB servers I have used that
allow me to connect, without requiring a password, with something
like:

  % mysql -h ensembldb.ensembl.org -U anonymous

Granted, all the examples I know of are, like the one shown above,
with MySQL servers, but I thought I'd be able to do the same thing
with Postgres.

Needless to say, my intention was to give the anonymous user minimal
privileges (namely, read-only queries on a specific database).

I suppose that even a user with minimal privileges could cause harm
(e.g. by submitting a very computationally demanding request).  Is
this the reason for the advice against such connections, or is there
something else?

kj