Re: Problem with pg_hba.conf file in Postgres 7.3

I've been trying to fix a problem with my pg_hba.conf file.
For some reason, when using an external file when declaring
a list of users that can see a database, postgress is giving
me a syntax error.

This line:

host       db1     user1,user2,user3       10.0.0.0   255.255.255.0   md5

works well, but this does not:

host       db1     @user_list               10.0.0.0   255.255.255.0   md5

The postgres docs say this is the right syntax, but the error I get is:

Jan 21 11:30:01 csl-db postgres[21377]: [3] LOG:  parse_hba: invalid
syntax in pg_hba.conf file at line 64, token "(end of line)"

Changing it back to a comma separated list removes the error, and
everything works fine.

I think the problem may be the file itself, but there's nothing in the
postgres docs that say how this file should be formatted.  The old 7.2
user_list file looks like this:

user1:+
user2:+
user3:+

Is this still the right syntax?  It would seem not, since the + now
referrs to groups.  However, this format did not work:

user1
user2
user3

neither did a comma separated list on one line.  The file user_list
is in the same directory as my pg_hba.conf.

A search on the novice site came up empty (no hits).

Any help would be grately appreciated.  :-)

April Carvalho
Community Software Engineer
Community Software Lab
http://csl.ltc.org