Re: Silent failure with invalid hba_file setting

On 19 October 2011 00:38, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Thom Brown <thom@linux.com> writes:
>> I noticed that if the hba_file setting in the config is uncommented
>> and set to a directory instead of the full path to the file, no error
>> occurs when the service starts.
>
> When I try that, I get a boatload of errors ending with
> FATAL:  could not load pg_hba.conf
>
> I suspect what happened to you is that the directory read like an empty
> file, so Postgres didn't see any error condition.  I suppose we could
> add an fstat test to see if we'd opened something other than a regular
> file, but I'm not terribly excited about it.
>
>> 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?

That would solve both problems, so +1 for that.

--
Thom Brown
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