>Anything running on the same machine, whether a shell, PHP, or Perl, is >covered by the "trust" statement, unless you make the mistake of >routing your connection through an external interface. this is what I was afraid of >However, I strongly reccommend against using "trust" on any public web >server. agreed, thus my concern... it appears however that if everything is set to password (or better) that postgres doesn't start on reboot. the startup script reads case $1 in start) [ -d /usr/local/pgsql/lib ] && /sbin/ldconfig -m /usr/local/pgsql/lib [ -x /usr/local/pgsql/bin/pg_ctl ] && { su -l pgsql -c \ 'exec /usr/local/pgsql/bin/pg_ctl -w start > /usr/local/pgsql/errlog echo -n ' pgsql' } ;; essentially what happens is that the startup waits for the password to be entered, and as such that and any following services in the local/rc directory are never started... it times out after a time (if memory serves). workaround without security ramifications? Dave