Thread: Forgot admin pw on initialization/install RH 7.3/PGSQL7.2

I made a dumb mistake, and forgot to write down the autogenerated
administrator password when I first started the Postgres database on
RedHat 7.3. I'm having a hard time finding information on how to do this
online, and it's a tricky term to search the archives for, as well.

I don't have any data I need to save (obviously), so how do I nuke the
data and configuration (particularly the admin user) created during the
initialization startup script? I don't want to go randomly deleting
postgres' .conf files when I don't know what I'm looking for.

Thanks.

[Jeff Kowalczyk]
> I made a dumb mistake, and forgot to write down the autogenerated
> administrator password when I first started the Postgres database on
> RedHat 7.3. I'm having a hard time finding information on how to do this
> online, and it's a tricky term to search the archives for, as well.
>
> I don't have any data I need to save (obviously), so how do I nuke the
> data and configuration (particularly the admin user) created during the
> initialization startup script? I don't want to go randomly deleting
> postgres' .conf files when I don't know what I'm looking for.

You could delete the primary database cluster, which I think is typically
stored here:

  /usr/local/pgsql/data/

You might want to just move it.  Then try using initdb to create a new
primary database cluster.

I'm fairly new to PostgreSQL, so there may be a more subtle approach I'm not
thinking of.

Cheers,

// mark

-

On Thu, May 23, 2002 at 11:20:27PM -0400, Jeff Kowalczyk wrote:
> I made a dumb mistake, and forgot to write down the autogenerated
> administrator password when I first started the Postgres database on
> RedHat 7.3. I'm having a hard time finding information on how to do this
> online, and it's a tricky term to search the archives for, as well.

It's well described in Chapter 4 of the Administrators' Guide.

Find your pg_hba.conf file (in your data directory;
rpm -ql postgresql | grep pg_hba will find it for you) and edit it
so that you can connect with no password (add a line like
local    all    trust
above the other lines), then connect and set a password of your
choice, then edit pg_hba.conf back. You'll need to do "pg_ctl reload"
to get Postgres to see your changes to pg_hba.conf .

Richard