I've just spent 20min trying to allow remote connections to a PostgresSQL database running on Ubuntu.

I did it before so I thought it was a 5min thing .. well no.

I updated the pg_hba.conf as usual and added entry for the client's host. No problem so far. Then I restarted the service and tried to connect .. but I got this message:

FATAL: no pg_hba.conf entry for host "XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX", user "username", database "dbname", SSL off

Well .. I double checked my config and found nothing wrong.

Then I restarted the server again, but this time I noticed something odd. The command yielded no output.

Not knowing where to start, I begin by doing a cat on /etc/init.d/postgresql and see this:

# versions can be specified explicitly
if [ -n "$2" ]; then
    versions="$2 $3 $4 $5 $6 $7 $8 $9"
else
    get_versions
fi

case "$1" in
    start|stop|restart|reload|status)
	for v in $versions; do
	    $1 $v
	done
        ;;
    force-reload)
	for v in $versions; do
	    reload $v
	done
        ;;
    *)
        echo "Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart|reload|force-reload|status} [version ..]"
        exit 1
        ;;
esac

exit 0

Interestingly .. the command can take a database version number as argument. OK let's try this:

$: sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql restart 8.4

* Restarting PostgreSQL 8.4 database server

Win.

Apparently for some reason the get_versions isn't working.

Another day, another bug.