"Jeffrey J. Early" <jearly@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > It turns out the problem is with launching postmaster via pg_ctl -- in fact, > pg_ctl seems to do this user authentication test, but postmaster doesn't. So > I found that if I launch postmaster directly, no problem. Nice security :-) The postmaster may start fine, but are you able to log in? The initial superuser account is still going to have the old username, so you might have some issues around obtaining superuser privileges. regards, tom lane