Re: Additional role attributes && superuser review

On Sun, Jan 17, 2016 at 01:49:19PM -0500, Stephen Frost wrote:
> * Bruce Momjian (bruce(at)momjian(dot)us) wrote:
> > > pgbackrest:
> > >
> > > To run pgbackrest as a non-superuser and not the 'postgres' system
> > > user, grant the pg_backup role to the backrest user and ensure the
> > > backrest system user has read access to the database files (eg: by
> > > having the system user be a member of the 'postgres' group):
> > ------
> >
> > Just to clarify, the 'postgres' OS user group cannot read the data
> > directory, e.g.
> >
> > drwx------ 19 postgres staff 4096 Jan 17 12:19 data/
> > ^^^group
> >
> > I assume we don't want to change that.
>
> This is going to be distribution dependent, unfortunately. On
> Debian-based distributions, the group is 'postgres' and it'd be
> perfectly reasonable to allow that group to read the data directory.

Well, while the group name would be OS-dependent, the lack of any group
permisions in not OS-dependent and is forced by initdb:

umask(S_IRWXG | S_IRWXO);

create_data_directory();

> I don't recall offhand if that means we'd have to make changes to allow
> that, but, for my 2c, I don't see why we wouldn't allow it to be an
> option.

OK, that would be an initdb change then.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

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