In OS X, what is a postgres group under accounts?
Asked by
rovdog (
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February 11th, 2011
I have turned on features so that I can share screens within my network between two macs but I never manually created this group, which now shows up in system prefs under accounts, then groups. I’m guessing that it is something that is automatically created for the purposes of sharing but I want to make sure someone is not trying to login remotely to my computers, since I did not manually create this group. Additionally, when I look at the members of the group, my normal user accounts seem to not be selected, but there is an unlabelled account that is selected as a member of this group. Any thoughts would be welcome- thank you!
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4 Answers
PostgreSQL will create this as part of Unix security to prevent someone from tampering with your database. The real question is what did you install that put PostgreSQL on your system, because I’m pretty sure that it’s not there by default (unless this has changed very recently).
What 3rd party software are you using? Anything that would need to store/manage a lot of data?
@crisw Not sure. I guess so. @gorillapaws I don’t know what I installe recently that would have done it. I use evernote and dropbox regularly, but this just showed up recently. I have downloaded trials of Devonthink, Yojimbo, and some other database programs. I recently got an ebook reader and downloaded both the Kobo program for the Kobo store and Adobe Digital Editions. Do you think it could have to do with that? One thing I just want to be sure of regardless is that this won’t be giving access to anyone else, b/c it worries me to have something I don’t understand show up under accounts. I don’t have to worry about that, right? right?
@rovdog no, it shouldn’t be giving access. I’m not sure how familiar you are with how Unix permissions work, but the idea of the Postgres user isn’t meant to be logged into. The only way to use it is to log in as root and then switch users into the Postgres user. So in order to take advantage of the Postgres user, you need root access. If a hacker already has root access, then Postgres user access isn’t any more useful to them because they already have the proverbial keys to the kingdom.
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