Can't connect to Postgresql on port 5432

Question

I have PostgreSQL 9.3 installed on a server running Ubuntu Server 14.04.

If I ssh into the server via terminal, I'm able to connect with psql. But when I try to configure pgAdmin III to do the remote connection, I get:

Server doesn't listen The server doesn't accept connections: the connection library reports could not connect to server: Connection refused Is the server running on host "172.24.3.147" and accepting TCP/IP connections on port 5432?

When I run on the server service postgresql status it gives me:

9.3/main (port 5432): online

So of course I'm missing something important here.

EDIT

When running netstat -na on the server, I get (relevant portion, I guess):

Active Internet connections (servers and established)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address           Foreign Address         State      
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:22              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN     
tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:5432          0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN     
tcp        0      0 172.24.3.147:22         172.24.3.240:61950      ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 172.24.3.147:22         172.24.3.240:60214      ESTABLISHED

Answer 1

You have to edit postgresql.conf file and change line with 'listen_addresses'.

This file you can find in the /etc/postgresql/9.3/main directory.

Default Ubuntu config have allowed only localhost (or 127.0.0.1) interface, which is sufficient for using, when every PostgreSQL client work on the same computer, as PostgreSQL server. If you want connect PostgreSQL server from other computers, you have change this config line in this way:

listen_addresses = '*'

Then you have edit pg_hba.conf file, too. In this file you have set, from which computers you can connect to this server and what method of authentication you can use. Usually you will need similar line:

host    all         all         192.168.1.0/24        md5

Please, read comments in this file...

EDIT:

After the editing postgresql.conf and pg_hba.conf you have to restart postgresql server.

EDIT2: Highlited configuration files.

Answer 2

Had same problem with psql via command line connecting and pgAdmin not connecting on RDS with AWS. I did have my RDS set to Publicly Accessible. I made sure my ACL and security groups were wide open and still problem so, I did the following: sudo find . -name *.conf then sudo nano ./data/pg_hba.conf then added to top of directives in pg_hba.conf file host all all 0.0.0.0/0 md5 and pgAdmin automatically logged me in.

This also worked in pg_hba.conf file host all all md5 without any IP address and this also worked with my IP address host all all <myip>/32 md5

As a side note, my RDS was in my default VPC. I had an identical RDS instance in my non-default VPC with identical security group, ACL and security group settings to my default VPC and I could not get it to work. Not sure why but, that's for another day.

Answer 3

You probably need to either open up the port to access it in your LAN (or outside of it) or bind the network address to the port (make PostgreSQL listen on your LAN instead of just on localhost)

Answer 4

Remember to check firewall settings as well. after checking and double-checking my pg_hba.conf and postgres.conf files I finally found out that my firewall was overriding everything and therefore blocking connections

Answer 5

I had the same problem after a MacOS system upgrade. Solved it by upgrading the postgres with brew. Details: it looks like the system was trying to access Postgres 11 using older Postgres 10 settings. I'm sure it was my mistake somewhere in the past, but luckily it all got sorted out with the upgrade above.

Answer 6

This has bitten me a second time so I thought might be worth mentioning. The line listen_addresses = '*' in the postgresql.conf is by default commented. Be sure to uncomment (remove the pound sign, # at the beginning) it after updating otherwise, remote connections will continue to be blocked.