Re: Additional role attributes && superuser review

On Sun, Jan 17, 2016 at 01:49:19PM -0500, Stephen Frost wrote:
> * Bruce Momjian (bruce@momjian.us) wrote:
> > > pgbackrest:
> > > 
> > >   To run pgbackrest as a non-superuser and not the 'postgres' system
> > >   user, grant the pg_backup role to the backrest user and ensure the
> > >   backrest system user has read access to the database files (eg: by
> > >   having the system user be a member of the 'postgres' group):
> >                                 ------
> > 
> > Just to clarify, the 'postgres' OS user group cannot read the data
> > directory, e.g.
> > 
> >     drwx------ 19 postgres staff 4096 Jan 17 12:19 data/
> >         ^^^group
> > 
> > I assume we don't want to change that.
> 
> This is going to be distribution dependent, unfortunately.  On
> Debian-based distributions, the group is 'postgres' and it'd be
> perfectly reasonable to allow that group to read the data directory.

Well, while the group name would be OS-dependent, the lack of any group
permisions in not OS-dependent and is forced by initdb:
   umask(S_IRWXG | S_IRWXO);
   create_data_directory();

> I don't recall offhand if that means we'd have to make changes to allow
> that, but, for my 2c, I don't see why we wouldn't allow it to be an
> option.

OK, that would be an initdb change then.

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com

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