hosting product, on both shared and dedicated machines. We currently
offer Oracle and MySQL, and it would be a nice middle-ground.
However, as shipped, PostgreSQL lacks the following features we need
that MySQL has:
1. The ability to listen only on a particular IP address. Each
hosting customer has their own IP address, on which all of their
servers (http, ftp, real media, etc.) run.
2. The ability to place the Unix-domain socket in a mode 700 directory.
This allows us to automatically create an empty database, with an
empty DBA password, for new or upgrading customers without having
to interactively set a DBA password and communicate it to (or from)
the customer. This in turn cuts down our install and upgrade times.
3. The ability to connect to the Unix-domain socket from within a
change-rooted environment. We run CGI programs chrooted to the
user's home directory, which is another reason why we need to be
able to specify where the Unix-domain socket is, instead of /tmp.
4. The ability to, if run as root, open a pid file in /var/run as
root, and then setuid to the desired user. (mysqld -u can almost
do this; I had to patch it, too).
The patch below fixes problem 1-3. I plan to address #4, also, but
haven't done so yet. These diffs are big enough that they should give
the PG development team something to think about in the meantime :-)
Also, I'm about to leave for 2 weeks' vacation, so I thought I'd get
out what I have, which works (for the problems it tackles), now.
With these changes, we can set up and run PostgreSQL with scripts the
same way we can with apache or proftpd or mysql.
In summary, this patch makes the following enhancements:
1. Adds an environment variable PGUNIXSOCKET, analogous to MYSQL_UNIX_PORT,
and command line options -k --unix-socket to the relevant programs.
2. Adds a -h option to postmaster to set the hostname or IP address to
listen on instead of the default INADDR_ANY.
3. Extends some library interfaces to support the above.
4. Fixes a few memory leaks in PQconnectdb().
The default behavior is unchanged from stock 7.0.2; if you don't use
any of these new features, they don't change the operation.
David J. MacKenzie
Update the installation instructions (formerly misnamed "FAQ"), add configure
checks for some headers rather than having users copy stubs manually (ugh!).
Use Autoconf check for exe extension. This also avoids inheriting the value
of $(X) from the environment.
(rather than compile time). For libpq, even when Kerberos support is
compiled in, the default user name should still fall back to geteuid()
if it can't be determined via the Kerberos system.
A couple of fixes for string type configuration parameters, now that there
is one.
backend functions via backend PQexec(). The SPI interface has long
been our only documented way to do this, and the backend pqexec/portal
code is unused and suffering bit-rot. I'm putting it out of its misery.
files to restrict the set of users that can connect to a database
but can still use the pg_shadow password. (You just leave off the
password field in the secondary file.)
for details). It doesn't really do that much yet, since there are no
short-term memory contexts in the executor, but the infrastructure is
in place and long-term contexts are handled reasonably. A few long-
standing bugs have been fixed, such as 'VACUUM; anything' in a single
query string crashing. Also, out-of-memory is now considered a
recoverable ERROR, not FATAL.
Eliminate a large amount of crufty, now-dead code in and around
memory management.
Fix problem with holding off SIGTRAP, SIGSEGV, etc in postmaster and
backend startup.
When drawing up a very simple "text-drawing" of how the negotiation is done,
I realised I had done this last part (fallback) in a very stupid way. Patch
#4 fixes this, and does it in a much better way.
Included is also the simple text-drawing of how the negotiation is done.
//Magnus
been applied. The patches are in the .tar.gz attachment at the end:
varchar-array.patch this patch adds support for arrays of bpchar() and
varchar(), which where always missing from postgres.
These datatypes can be used to replace the _char4,
_char8, etc., which were dropped some time ago.
block-size.patch this patch fixes many errors in the parser and other
program which happen with very large query statements
(> 8K) when using a page size larger than 8192.
This patch is needed if you want to submit queries
larger than 8K. Postgres supports tuples up to 32K
but you can't insert them because you can't submit
queries larger than 8K. My patch fixes this problem.
The patch also replaces all the occurrences of `8192'
and `1<<13' in the sources with the proper constants
defined in include files. You should now never find
8192 hardwired in C code, just to make code clearer.
--
Massimo Dal Zotto
can be generated in a buffer and then sent to the frontend in a single
libpq call. This solves problems with NOTICE and ERROR messages generated
in the middle of a data message or COPY OUT operation.
Ok. I made patches replacing all of "#if FALSE" or "#if 0" to "#ifdef
NOT_USED" for current. I have tested these patches in that the
postgres binaries are identical.
Here's another patch for the libpq backend areas. This patch removes all
usage of "FILE *" on the communications channel. It also cleans up the
comments and headers in the pqcomm.c file - a lot of things were either
missing or incorrect. Finally, it removes a couple of unused functions
(leftovers from the time of shared code between the libpq backend and
frontend).
Here is a first patch to cleanup the backend side of libpq.
This patch removes all external dependencies on the "Pfin" and "Pfout" that
are declared in pqcomm.h. These variables are also changed to "static" to
make sure.
Almost all the change is in the handler of the "copy" command - most other
areas of the backend already used the correct functions.
This change will make the way for cleanup of the internal stuff there - now
that all the functions accessing the file descriptors are confined to a
single directory.
Here is a new patch for libpq, to make it work on Win32 again (since
the latest modifications broke it a little).
Please also add the file "libpq.rc" to the interfaces/libpq directory.
This will allow version-stamping of the generated DLL file, so that
automatic install programs (and interested users) can determine
the version of the file. The file is currently set as "prerelease".
Before the release, somebody should change the line "FILEFLAGS
VS_FF_PRERELEASE" to "FILEFLAGS 0". That information should probably
go into toos\RELEASE_CHANGES.
The patch is against the cvs as of ~ 1998-08-26 14:30 CEST.
//Magnus
Summary of changes:
In pqcomm.h, use the SUN_LEN macro if it is defined to calculate
the size of the sockaddr_un structure.
In unixware.h, drop the use of the UNIXWARE macro. Everything can
be handled with the USE_UNIVEL_CC and DISABLE_COMPLEX_MACRO macros.
In s_lock.h, remove the reference to the UNIXWARE macro (see above).
In the unixware template, add the YFLAGS:-d line.
In various makefile templates, add (or cleanup) unixware and univel
port specific information.
-- Billy G. Allie
calls. Outside a transaction, the backend detects them as buffer
leaks; it sends a NOTICE, and frees them. This sometimes cause a
segmentation fault (at least on Linux). These indexes are initialized
on the first lo_read/lo_write/lo_tell call, and (normally) closed
on a lo_close call. Thus the buffer leaks appear when lo direct
access functions are used, and not with lo_import/lo_export functions
(libpq version calls lo_close before ending the command, and the
backend version uses another path).
The included patches (against recent snapshot, and against 6.3.2)
cause indexes to be closed on transaction end (that is on explicit
'END' statment, or on command termination outside trasaction blocks),
thus preventing the buffer leaks while increasing performance inside
transactions. Some (all?) 'classic' memory leaks are also removed.
I hope it will be ok.
--- Pascal ANDRE, graduated from Ecole Centrale Paris andre@via.ecp.fr
Making PQrequestCancel safe to call in a signal handler turned out to be
much easier than I feared. So here are the diffs.
Some notes:
* I modified the postmaster's packet "iodone" callback interface to allow
the callback routine to return a continue-or-drop-connection return
code; this was necessary to allow the connection to be closed after
receiving a Cancel, rather than proceeding to launch a new backend...
Being a neatnik, I also made the iodone proc have a typechecked
parameter list.
* I deleted all code I could find that had to do with OOB.
* I made some edits to ensure that all signals mentioned in the code
are referred to symbolically not by numbers ("SIGUSR2" not "2").
I think Bruce may have already done at least some of the same edits;
I hope that merging these patches is not too painful.
I have implemented a framework of encoding translation between the
backend and the frontend. Also I have added a new variable setting
command:
SET CLIENT_ENCODING TO 'encoding';
Other features include:
Latin1 support more 8 bit cleaness
See doc/README.mb for more details. Note that the pacthes are
against May 30 snapshot.
Tatsuo Ishii
have > 20000 users and each (potentially) needs a separate database
which is > only accessible to them. Rather than having 20000 lines
in pg_hba.conf, > I've patched Postgres so that the special token
"sameuser" in the > database field of pg_hba.conf allows access
only to the username which > is connecting.
1. Rewritten libpq to allow asynchronous clients.
2. Implemented client side of cancel protocol in library,
and patched psql.c to send a cancel request upon SIGINT. The
backend doesn't notice it yet :-(
3. Implemented 'Z' protocol message addition and renaming of
copy in/out start messages. These are implemented conditionally,
ie, the client protocol version is checked; so the code should
still work with 1.0 clients.
4. Revised protocol and libpq sgml documents (don't have an SGML
compiler, though, so there may be some markup glitches here).
What remains to be done:
1. Implement addition of atttypmod field to RowDescriptor messages.
The client-side code is there but ifdef'd out. I have no idea
what to change on the backend side. The field should be sent
only if protocol >= 2.0, of course.
2. Implement backend response to cancel requests received as OOB
messages. (This prolly need not be conditional on protocol
version; just do it if you get SIGURG.)
3. Update libpq.3. (I'm hoping this can be generated mechanically
from libpq.sgml... if not, will do it by hand.) Is there any
other doco to fix?
4. Update non-libpq interfaces as necessary. I patched libpgtcl
so that it would compile, but haven't tested it. Dunno what
needs to be done with the other interfaces.
Have at it!
Tom Lane
I've completed the patch to fix the protocol and authentication issues I
was discussing a couple of weeks ago. The particular changes are:
- the protocol has a version number
- network byte order is used throughout
- the pg_hba.conf file is used to specify what method is used to
authenticate a frontend (either password, ident, trust, reject, krb4
or krb5)
- support for multiplexed backends is removed
- appropriate changes to man pages
- the -a switch to many programs to specify an authentication service
no longer has any effect
- the libpq.so version number has changed to 1.1
The new backend still supports the old protocol so old interfaces won't
break.
o A new patch that contains the following changes:
-- The pg_pwd file is now cached in the postmaster's memory.
-- pg_pwd is reloaded when the postmaster detects a flag file creat()'ed
by a backend.
-- qsort() is used to sort loaded password entries, and bsearch() is
is used to find entries in the pg_pwd cache.
-- backends now copy the pg_user relation to pg_pwd.pid, and then
rename the temp file to be pg_pwd.
-- The delimiter for pg_pwd has been changed to a tab character.
Subject: [HACKERS] libpq/pqcomm stuff and Solaris byte order
I decided to go ahead with the required changes since no one else seems
to. I don't guarantee that it is perfect but with these changes the
package actually compiles. While I was at it I added to the Sparc
Solaris header to define the byte order. Note that NetBSD sets this
in the system headers so it wasn't required there.
In particular, someone may want to check whether I removed the correct
84 lines from backend/libpq/pqcomprim.c.
Subject: [HACKERS] Patch for io routines
I am currently trying to improve on the front-backend communication
routines; and noticed that lots of code are duplicated for libpq and
the backend. This is a first patch that tries to share code between
the two, more to follow.
mjl
Subject: [HACKERS] password authentication
This patch adds support for plaintext password authentication. To use
it, you add a line like
host all 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 password pg_pwd.conf
to your pg_hba.conf, where 'pg_pwd.conf' is the name of a file containing
the usernames and password hashes in the format of the first two fields
of a Unix /etc/passwd file. (Of course, you can use a specific database
name or IP instead.)
Then, to connect with a password through libpq, you use the PQconnectdb()
function, specifying the "password=" tag in the connect string and also
adding the tag "authtype=password".
I also added a command-line switch '-u' to psql that tells it to prompt
for a username and password and use password authentication.
I'm able to get through a 'make' of the backend with no errors except
the occasional 'might not be initialized error', which is nothing major,
just annoying.
Have a few patches from D'Arcy to incorporate, but am waiting until I can
get a clean compile first, which I'm hoping to have before bed, or sometime
tomorrow.