FATAL: could not access private key file “/etc/ssl

Question

I believe I ended up mixing up permissions at /etc/ssl directories tree as the last modification was made on 18th November and a day after I could not get my PostgreSQL to work.

When I type in

sudo service postgresql start

I get

FATAL: could not access private key file “/etc/ssl/private/ssl-cert-snakeoil.key”: Permission denied

Checking permissions

~$ sudo -i
~$ ls -la /etc/ssl/private
drw-r----- 2 root ssl-cert 4096 Nov 18 21:10 .
-rwxrwxrwx 1 postgres postgres 1704 Set 4 11:26 ssl-cert-snakeoil.key

Checking group composition

~$ id postgres
uid=114(postgres) gid=127(postgres) groups=127(postgres),114(ssl-cert)

Also I noticed that my ssl-cert-snakeoil.pem file at /etc/ssl/certs/ doesn't have a symlink. I don't know if this makes any difference...

Please, help me sort this out.

Thanks.

Edit: Should it be posted on serverfault instead?

Answer 1

Try setting permissions on the .key file to 600. Postgres doesn't like key files with group or world permissions set. You may also need to change the owner to postgres, though I'm not sure about that.

Answer 2

I was suffering from this issue when attempting to start Postgresql on a remote docker instance. I eventually tracked down the crazy solution here. Basically you have to recreate the directories, chown on it's own doesn't work:

mkdir /etc/ssl/private-copy; mv /etc/ssl/private/* /etc/ssl/private-copy/; rm -r /etc/ssl/private; mv /etc/ssl/private-copy /etc/ssl/private; chmod -R 0700 /etc/ssl/private; chown -R postgres /etc/ssl/private

Answer 3

Try adding postgres user to the group ssl-cert

Run the below code to fix the above and fixing the permissions

# > It happened to me and it turned out that I removed erroneously the postgres user from "ssl-cert" group, set it back with
sudo gpasswd -a postgres ssl-cert

# Fixed ownership and mode
sudo chown root:ssl-cert  /etc/ssl/private/ssl-cert-snakeoil.key
sudo chmod 740 /etc/ssl/private/ssl-cert-snakeoil.key

# now postgresql starts! (and install command doesn't fail anymore)
sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql start

courtsey to GabLeRoux

Answer 4

Check the output of

$ sudo -u postgres
$ cd /etc/ssl/private
$ ls

If the response is "Permission denied" do

$ chown postgres:ssl-cert /etc/ssl/private/
$ chown postgres:postgres /etc/ssl/private/ssl-cert-snakeoil.key