FATAL: password authentication failed for user "postgres"
If you have this error:
If I remember correctly the user postgres
has no DB password set on Ubuntu by default. That means, that you can login to that account only by using the postgres
OS user account.
Assuming, that you have root
access on the box you can do:
sudo -u postgres psql
If any of those commands fail with an error psql: FATAL: password authentication failed for user "postgres"
then check the file `/etc/postgresql/8.4/main/pg_hba.conf: There must be a line like this as the first non-comment line:
local all postgres ident
For newer versions of PostgreSQL ident
actually might be peer
. That's OK also.
Inside the psql
shell you can give the DB user postgres
a password:
ALTER USER postgres PASSWORD 'newPassword';