There's a gripe over here http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2007-10/msg00640.php to the effect that PG should not give a message like "password authentication failure" when the user is attempting to log in as a NOLOGIN role. This surprised me because there is a specific message for that, and it worked when I tried it:
regression=# create user foo nologin; CREATE ROLE regression=# \c - foo FATAL: role "foo" is not permitted to log in Previous connection kept regression=# On investigation though, it turns out that it depends on which auth mode you're using: some of the auth modes look up the user in the flat password file, and some don't. Now flatfiles.c makes a point of not entering roles into the flat password file if they are not rolcanlogin, which means that for password auth you are guaranteed to fail long before you can get to the explicit check in InitializeSessionUserId. We could certainly change flatfiles.c to disregard rolcanlogin, which'd actually make the code simpler. However, that in itself wouldn't change the behavior, unless you were to assign a password to the NOLOGIN role which seems a fairly strange thing to do. I think what the OP wishes is that "not permitted to log in" would be checked before checking password validity, and to do that we'd have to add rolcanlogin to the flat password file and put the check somewhere upstream of the authentication process. I am not entirely convinced whether we should do anything about this: the general theory on authentication failures is that you don't say much about exactly why it failed, so as to not give a brute-force attacker any info about whether he gave a valid userid or not. So there's an argument to be made that the current behavior is what we want. But I'm pretty sure that it wasn't intentionally designed to act this way. Comments? regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org