Re: [stellation-res] Postgresql connection parameters

["Mark C. Chu-Carroll" <mcc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jonathan Gossage wrote:

> I have seem a couple of references in the mailing list stateing that you
> cannot use host or port parameters when connecting to Postgres. Since the
> documentation indicates that these are supported, why do we have this
> limitation?
Because the way that Stellation code uses postgres, the database *must* 
be on
the same machine as the Stellation server. We use it this way because 
postgres
security is rather a pain in the neck to configure correctly, but the 
default
configuration that standard postgres distributions use provide a security
regime that allows connections *only* from the same machine as the
postgres server.  So when I wrote the Stellation postgres support, I 
wrote it
assuming that it would use that default configuration.

So far, I've always taken a very passive approach towards databases: we get
a huge amount of value from using a database, but the databases are also
potentially a significant barrier to entry to potential users of 
Stellation.  So
I've always focused on trying to make the database as transparent as
possible: using default configurations and installations whenever possible.

The main case where it seemed likely that someone would want to run
with a postgres server on a different machine from the Stellation server
would be for *very* large repositories: repository that are probably
well beyond the scale at which Stellation will realistically work. In
addition, Postgres is not a system that can realistically scale to a 
huge size -
so if you could somehow make Stellation scale that well, I don't believe 
that
you would be using postgres.

So, all in all, it just didn't seem worth going beyond the simple default
configuration of postgres on the same machine as the Stellation server.

It wouldn't be hard to make the postgres support allow the specification of
host and port. I think it would be hard in the install and configure docs to
explain how to configure postgres so that that would work in a reasonably
secure fashion.

   -Mark

--
Mark Craig Chu-Carroll,  IBM T.J. Watson Research Center  
*** The Stellation project: Advanced SCM for Collaboration
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