Martin Steffen writes: > worked fine for some years, only that when I changed recently to a new > linux distribution (from Suse 10 to the latest Fedora core), things broke. [...] > - or postgres applies tougher access restrictions on > the new linux distribution, and therefore rejects me > > What is strange, however, is that I can access the > running data base as "user-name" using the command-line > tool psql just fine, without being rejected. [...] > signal(error ("Backend error: FATAL: Ident authentication failed for user \"user-name\"\n")) Since pg.el only supports connections via tcp, a possible explanation of psql's differing behavior could be that pg_hba.conf specifies different authentication methods for unix domain and network sockets. E.g., while SuSE used the "trust" method for local tcp connections, Fedora might be using the "ident" method. The pg_hba.conf file is documented here: <http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/client-authentication.html> regards, andreas