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I was about to shut down my laptop and noticed the user account called "postgres" showed up. I don't know the password and I didn't create it (meaning hit a create new account button to my knowledge). The only things I've installed recently are metasploit, nmap and Gnumeric Spreadsheet. I'm understandably confused and would love if people could get me some answers, or at least the password :)

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  • did you install postgresql? Oct 21, 2014 at 3:30

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I am no Metasploit expert, but this guide says that it uses PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL, like many other services on Ubuntu (like Apache, nginx, MySQL, nslcd, etc.), runs a daemon as a separate user. This helps in security. Login should be disabled for this user by default (so, no password).

The PostgreSQL account shouldn't be visible on LightDM (it should be using an UID outside the normal range of visibility on LightDM) so you could consider filing a bug.

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Postgres is an open source database management system, which Metasploit uses for its database. As a result, during the installation, a new 'postgres' user was created.

Because I don't know how Metasploit was installed, I don't know what was set as the password. If the extra user account is bothersome, you can always hide the account using this method.

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The user is created by postgresqlon which one of your programs depend. Its no problem that you have an extra user on your machine, in fact you'll have several such users for various purposes on your computer. These users generally dont have a password because usually no one interactively logs into the user account. If you want to use that account for some reason, you can do a sudo su - postgres.

You can hide this user from the login screen by doing a sudo usermod -u 800 postgres. (Any value under 1000 will suffice).

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