Date #
2025-08-20
LLM #
ChatGPT 4o
Problem #
I’m having difficulty connecting to a PostgreSQL
instance deployed by the Percona Operator for
PostgreSQL
in a k8s cluster. I’m able to connect with the psql
command line client as well as DBeaver and
DBGate, but not with PGAdmin. When
I attempt to connect with pgadmin, I see the following errors:
connection failed: connection to server at port 5432 failed: SSL error: tlsv1 alert no application protocol
and:
SSL error: tlsv1 alert no application protocol
Prompt #
I’m having difficulty connecting to a PostgreSQL instance deployed by the Percona Operator for PostgreSQL in a k8s cluster. I’m able to connect with the psql command line client as well as DBeaver and DBGate, but not with PGAdmin. When I attempt to connect with pgadmin, I see the following errors: “connection failed: connection to server at port 5432 failed: SSL error: tlsv1 alert no application protocol” and “SSL error: tlsv1 alert no application protocol”
Transcript #
For some reason, I can no longer find my original conversation with ChatGPT about this. I’m not sure if things are just disappearing from my chat history, or if I’m zoning out on where I originally had this discussion. This is a recollection of the transcript based on my debug log of the issue.
Basically, ChatGPT 4o was able to see that there was an issue with TLS connection settings and walked me through attempting to debug that. It gave me some openssl commands that I could run against my cluster to validate that different versions of TLS were indeed working:
$ openssl s_client -connect 6a0056f8.example.com:5432 -tls1_2
Connecting to 10.156.21.165
CONNECTED(00000003)
depth=2 C=US, O=Internet Security Research Group, CN=ISRG Root X1
verify return:1
depth=1 C=US, O=Let's Encrypt, CN=R11
verify return:1
depth=0 CN=6a0056f8.example.com
verify return:1
$ openssl s_client -connect 6a0056f8.example.com:5432 -tls1_3
Connecting to 10.156.21.165
CONNECTED(00000003)
depth=2 C=US, O=Internet Security Research Group, CN=ISRG Root X1
verify return:1
depth=1 C=US, O=Let's Encrypt, CN=R11
verify return:1
depth=0 CN=6a0056f8.example.com
verify return:1
It then suggested that I validate that I was running the latest version of pgAdmin. I upgraded, and then it told me to try with various sslmode options in my pgAmdin config.
sslmode=require
sslmode=verify-ca
sslmode=verify-full
None of these had any effect.
Eventually, I gave up and went back to web searching for my error message and found this issue which lead me to this post on the PostgreSQL mailing lists that had the fix.
What the LLM did well #
- Had good debugging hints to help me narrow down where the trouble might be.
- Helped me validate that TLS versions were working between my machine and the server.
What the LLM got wrong #
- It wasn’t able to solve the root issue.
What I expected #
Help solving my problem.
The LLM did help, and lead me through various validations but in the end I needed to do an old fashioned web search to find others having the same problem I was experiencing.
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