All right, I had some spare time today, so I went and installed this thing.
My setup is a bit more complex than the minimum necessary, but that’s because I’m using an already existing Postgres database instead of installing a new one on my computer. It is as follows: Postgres running on a mini PC on my local network (192.168.2.199:5432), a browser running on my main computer, and a Debian VM for DBgate with two NICs - one is the default NAT interface (I’m too lazy to configure proper bridging / routing) and the second is a virtual bridge, testbr. On testbr, the host OS is 192.168.123.1/24, and the guest is 192.168.123.2/24.
I installed DBgate on the VM using NPM - npm install -g dbgate-serve, as specified in the documentation. Then I ran it using simply dbgate-serve, then connected to it from a browser running on my host OS as 192.168.123.2:3000. That works fine.
Then I added my Postgres DB through the web interface (to be verbose, I entered 192.168.2.199 as the IP address), created a table and inserted some dummy data. Then I wanted to do the next step, which is to block outgoing connections to port 5432 from the VM, but I noticed something very strange, given that DBgate obviously doesn’t use the server as a backend to do the actual DB connection: this was in the server log
{"pid":7012,"caller":"databaseConnections","conid":"24d95082-ca6a-4dac-aa28-f3121bfc508d","database":"dbgate","sql":"INSERT INTO \"public\".\"dbgate_test\" (\"text\") VALUES ('haha');\nINSERT INTO \"public\".\"dbgate_test\" (\"text\") VALUES ('hehe');\n","level":30,"msg":"Processing script","time":1744395411096}
But it would be ridiculous to even suggest that the connection is relayed through the server, so it is probably some kind of telemetry. Makes sense.
Anyway, I went ahead and added the rules on the VM nft add table ip filter, nft ‘add chain ip filter output { type filter hook output priority 0; tcp dport 5432 drop; }’, and you wouldn’t believe what happened next… The DBgate tab can no longer load data from the database. I can reload DBgate itself without any issues, and I can connect to the database from the same computer using psql and DataGrip just fine, but for some reason it seems to be affected by the fact that its server (which is only serving the HTML/JS files and doing nothing else, as you said) cannot connect to Postgres.
Weird how that works, huh?
jogai_san@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yet you ignore I pointed to the api component in the repo…