Database connections

There are many configuration parameters that control how people can connect remotely and locally to the database. The complete list is documented at http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/runtime-config-connection.html.

listen_addresses

Any installation that requires connecting from a remote system will need to change listen_addresses to allow that. The default only allows local connections from users logged into the same system as the database server. A common approach is to accept incoming connections from anywhere, as far as the primary configuration file is concerned, like this:

listen_addresses = '*'

And then setup the pg_hba.conf file described at http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/auth-pg-hba-conf.html to control who can actually connect. There is a potential performance concern to this approach, in that filtering out connections using a more focused setting for listen_addresses can be more efficient than letting clients connect...