Users in pg_shadow

Scott Holmes writes:

I have a cron script set up to run VACUUM ANALYZE on two databases that appear
to work fine except for a couple of messages that show up in the log:

FATAL 1: SetUserId: user 'newsltr' is not in 'pg_shadow'
FATAL 1: SetUserId: user 'wcgc_pg' is not in 'pg_shadow'

newsltr and wcgc_pg are the respective names of the databases, there are no
users with these names. This is on a postgresql-7.0.2 running on a Red Hat 6.2

You should make your cron script to connect as the proper user, probably
using the -U option of psql or vacuumdb. Otherwise the user name defaults
to one of various things, which is probably not desired here.

I've seen no problems resulting from this but I would like to understand why.

Only if the fact that the VACUUM ANALYZE probably didn't actually execute
is not a problem... ;-)

--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e@gmx.net http://yi.org/peter-e/

Well, I did have the -U argument using $PGUSER. However, I made the all too
common mistake of forgetting that cron may or maynot have particular
environmental variables set.

Thanks...

One possible part of a cron script:

su --command="psql -d $PGUSER -c 'vacuum analyze;' > /dev/null" $PGUSER

where 'PGUSER' has been defined as the appropriate user name. Of course,
you'll need a bit more if your database has a different name.

HTH...

-frank