On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 2:18 AM, Craig Ringer
<craig@postnewspapers.com.au> wrote:
> On 06/12/2012 08:08 PM, Dave Page wrote:
>>
>> Some background: By default the installer will use 'postgres' for both
>> the service (OS) account, and the database superuser account. It will
>> use the same password for both (though, users have complete control at
>> the command line if they want it, which is why the account names are
>> shown in the installer). Unlike *nix installations, the service
>> account must have a password, which is required during both
>> installation and upgrade to configure the PostgreSQL service. We
>> therefore ask for the password during both installation and upgrade.
>> If the user account exists (which can happen if there has previously
>> been an installation of Postgres on the system), the user must specify
>> the existing password for the account during installation (and of
>> course, during all upgrades). This is where users normally get stuck,
>> as they've forgotten the password they set in the past.
>
> They may not even have set it, because the EnterpriseDB installer can be run
> unattended and may've been used by some 3rd party package.
>
> I'd be interested in seeing what Microsoft installers that create isolated
> user accounts do. I think .NET creates one for ASP, so that'd be one option
> to look into.
They tend to use the localsystem or networkservice accounts for most
things, which don't have passwords. The reason we don't do that is
that since the early days of 8.0 we've said we want to enable users to
use the service account as if it were a regular account, so that they
can do things like access network resources (useful for server-side
copy for example).
I wasn't overly convinced back then that that was necessary, and I'm
still not now. I suppose we potentially could use the networkservice
account by default, and let advanced users override that on the
command line if they need to. Then remembering the password becomes
their responsibility.
--
Dave Page
Blog: http://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake
EnterpriseDB UK: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company
