Thank you Tom Lane and Phillip Smith, you've answered my questions.
--Geoff
On Jun 15, 2006, at 22:46, Tom Lane wrote:
> Geoffrey Knauth <geoff@knauth.org> writes:
>> Andrew Sullivan wrote:
>>> Well, do you actually have an interface with that address?
>
>> I think I do, in that the machine's wireless interface is set up with
>> a 192.168.1.x/24 address and 1.33 is on the same subnet. Or maybe
>> I'm misunderstanding. I thought the purpose of listen_addresses was
>> to allowing incoming connections only from listed addresses.
>
> You're misunderstanding then. What listen_addresses can bind to is IP
> addresses of *your own machine*. For example, if you bind to only
> 127.0.0.1 then only local loopback connections will work. Binding to
> just one external IP address is only interesting if your machine has
> more than one such address; then it prevents connections that're
> coming
> in through one of the other addresses.
>
> The right way to limit incoming connections to only come *from*
> particular IP addresses is to use pg_hba.conf.
>
> regards, tom lane
