Tom Brown wrote:

...

Try instead: sudo -u postgres createuser -ADP foo

Thanks - got further but now i see this

# sudo -u postgres psql -f central.sql -q FOO foo psql: FATAL: IDENT authentication failed for user "foo"

...

See http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.4/interactive/client-authentication.html and /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf.

I have looked here and my 'trust' lines look like this

host all all 127.0.0.1 255.255.255.255 trust host all all 192.168.11.238 255.255.255.255 trust

however that issue still occurs - any thoughts?

probably, you're not using TCP/IP to connect. Read the docs more closely.

On Tue, Apr 10, 2007 at 01:47:56PM +0100, Tom Brown wrote:

...

# sudo -u postgres psql -f central.sql -q FOO foo psql: FATAL: IDENT authentication failed for user "foo"

OK - if i change that line to read

# sudo -u postgres psql -f central.sql -q FOO

that runs fine - So i need to find out from the application people what the difference in those 2 commands is

The first connects as user foo to the database FOO, while the other connects as the current user (postgres, after sudo).

If you do have a system user foo, you could sudo to it instead of postgres: # sudo -u foo psql -f central.sql -q FOO

I have looked here and my 'trust' lines look like this

host all all 127.0.0.1 255.255.255.255 trust host all all 192.168.11.238 255.255.255.255 trust

You're missing lines for local, as psql uses by default unix sockets (as John Summerfield pointed out): local all all trust

Note that this isn't very secure, as any user in the host can presume to be any other user, so you should change trust to md5 and make sure you have passwords defined for all postgres users.