Hi

 

I'm a long-time user of unRAID and infrequent forum user who has benefited on a number of occasions from the support and tools found in the unRAID community. I thought I'd like to give something back, I had a need for a PostgreSQL server running on my unRAID box, and there didn't already seem to be a PostgreSQL plugin. So I packaged it up and turned it into an unRAID plugin.

 

To install:

[*]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/75656262/plugin.postgresql/postgresql-tallorder.plg

[*]Place the .plg file in /boot/config/plugins aka \\tower\flash\config\plugins

[*]Reboot, or via terminal run installplg /boot/config/plugins/postgresql-tallorder.plg

[*]Visit the Settings page in the unRAID Web GUI (looks much nicer if you've upgraded your webGui)

[*]The data directory must not be under /mnt/user, but it can be on /mnt/diskX or /mnt/cache.

[*]Apply your settings.

[*]Press the Init DB button if required (generally always necessary if you're starting afresh).

[*]Press the Start button to start the PostgreSQL server.

[*]Connect using PgAdmin III v1.18 or later (necessary due to changes in PostgreSQL 9.3 - seriously, use v1.18 or later!)

A few caveats:

• This is my first unRAID plugin, so please be kind!
  
• It's installing PostgreSQL 9.3.1 (currently the latest), with all documentation and extensions.
  
• The way the installed PostgreSQL server is configured is NOT SECURE for use beyond your home network! (See below.)
  
• The /mnt/user file system doesn't appear to support features needed by PostgreSQL during initdb. Use a specific disk, or your cache and it should work fine.
  
• I am installing openssl-solibs-1.0.1c-i486-3.txz, which is a dependency of my PostgreSQL build. I didn't notice until just now that package is actually from Slackware 14.0 and is a bit newer than the one normally used with unRAID... it hasn't caused me any conflicts with the OpenSSH plugin but if it gives you grief then let me know and I can rebuild PostgreSQL to use the older version.
  

Kudos to overbyrn and p1lot for their fantastic plugins which I use regularly, and whose code I referred to heavily (i.e., copied and hacked on mercilessly) while putting this together.

 

Note about security: To improve ease of installation, this server is configured to automatically listen on all NICs and to allow any incoming connections without authentication! This is hopelessly insecure (in fact this behaviour doesn't really even count as "security" at all!) PostgreSQL itself is capable of really robust security but that can add complexity... by disabling those two aspects (particularly by enabling the broad "trust" access) it makes it a lot easier to get PostgreSQL working entirely through the plugin, without ever editing configuration files. But if your unRAID box is publicly accessible then you'd be crazy to leave it that way, and should instead pay careful attention to the contents of your pg_hba.conf file. The average user running unRAID on a home network will probably prefer this permissiveness however, especially if you're just installing PostgreSQL to provide database services to some other tool or application.

 

I'll be seriously considering whether it's worth the compromise in security to gain the ease of use, and may revert that behaviour in the final release.

 

Anyway, feedback, comments and suggestions are welcome.

 

-- tallorder

Hi there,

 

On trying to run the 'Init DB' button nothing seems to happen.

 

I believe it may be a permissions thing though, as if i create the 'database directory' manually, it gets populated by the pg_hba.conf but if i dont create it manually, its never created.

 

It simply pops up with

'The files belonging to this database system will be owned by user "postgres".

This user must also own the server process.

 

The database cluster will be initialized with locale "C".

The default database encoding has accordingly been set to "SQL_ASCII".

The default text search configuration will be set to "english".

 

Data page checksums are disabled.

 

However database folder shows Not[b/] initialized