Setup POSTGRESQL with IDENT Authentication method

Yoo... this thing takes several hours for me to make it works –____-,
I just can’t find a good example about this.
IDENT Authentication indeed really an evil one. (he said that) >:).

So here we go :

1. assuming that you already have installed your own POSTGRESQL on your workstation, if no, then this is a short step you need to take :
   

   #yum install postgresql

   #yum install pgadmin3 (optional)

   by default, you can install POSTGRESQL when you installed fresh Fedora 14 (ehhmm... advertise :D). For the complete step you can read this.

2. For the first time using POSTGRESQL after installation you would need to do initialization

   #service <postgresql_service_name> initdb

3. Ok, by default if you installed new version of POSTGRESQL e.g "PostgreSQL 8.4.5 on i386-redhat-linux-gnu" it will set the local and host authentication type into IDENT. Try to open the pg_hba.conf file : (you need root acces to edit this file)

   # nano /etc/var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf

   then you'll find this part in it :

   # TYPE DATABASE USER CIDR-ADDRESS METHOD 
   # "local" is for Unix domain socket connections only 
   local all all ident
   # IPv4 local connections: 
   host all all 127.0.0.1/32 ident
   # IPv6 local connections: 
   host all all ::1/128 ident

   
   The ident authentication method works by inspecting the client's operating system user name and determining the allowed database user names by using a map file that lists the permitted corresponding user name pairs. You could read more about IDENT from here.
   


4. When we used IDENT authentication, we'll need IDENT server, it's used to answer questions like "What user initiated the connection that goes out of your port X and connects to my port Y?", now I'm using OIDENTD, to install OIDENTD you just need :
   

   #yum install oidentd

   you can read more about oidentd from here

5. Ok, let's begin to editing all files that necessary to makes IDENT Authentication works, start from postgresql's ident file :
   

   # nano /var/lib/pgqsql/data/pg_ident.conf

   add this configuration at the lowest line :

   # MAPNAME     SYSTEM-USERNAME    PG-USERNAME 
   test      uzer              postgres
   

   
   now open again pg_hba.conf then add mapname into it :
   
   

   # TYPE  DATABASE    USER        CIDR-ADDRESS          METHOD 
   # "local" is for Unix domain socket connections only 
   local   all         all                               ident map=test
   # IPv4 local connections: 
   host    all         all         127.0.0.1/32          ident map=test
   # IPv6 local connections: 
   host    all         all         ::1/128               ident

   you musn’t skip this step or you will receive error when you try to connect to your database:

   LOG: provided username (postgres) and authenticated username (uzer) don't match
   FATAL: Ident authentication failed for user "postgres"

6. Oidentd used default configuration oidentd.conf, it should be in /etc/oidentd.conf, but I don't know why, on my local /etc, oidentd.conf doesn't exist. So, I need to create it by my self with

   #nano /etc/oidentd.conf

   and if fill it with :

   default {
   default {
   deny spoof
   deny spoof_all
   deny spoof_privport
   allow random_numeric
   allow numeric
   allow hide
   }
   }
   
   user uzer {
   default {
   allow spoof
   allow spoof_all
   allow random
   allow hide
   }
   }
   
   

   I just add these lines to oidentd.conf but sorry, I can't explain anything about this, I can't get any other details except this.
   
   
7. Everything is set, now we are ready. Run Oidentd and postgresql services with this command in terminal :

#oidentd -C /etc/oidentd.conf
#service postgresql start

yapz.. that's all we need to used IDENT authentication method in POSTGRESQL and I am really looking forward your comment, especially about point six. Well, otherwise if you don’t to do the setup, you can just change the IDENT to md5 to save your time configuring POSTGRESQL. Thanks for reading anyway ... :)