Sometimes you need to provide remote administration where you can not directly connect to your server via ssh and create tunnels. For security reasons, by default, postgresql disables all remote connections.
Here are my notes on how to make postgresql sql available to other systems on the same network. I found these instructions to be the easiest and generally secure. If you have a good understanding of networking, you can further lock this down.
sudo vi /etc/postgresql/8.4/main/postgresql.conf
Search for this line,
#listen_addresses = 'localhost' # what IP address(es) to listen on;
Change to,
listen_addresses = '*' # what IP address(es) to listen on;
Modify,
sudo vi /etc/postgresql/8.4/main/pg_hba.conf
And add this line to the bottom of the file where 192.168.0.0/16 is reflective of your particular network range. In this example, we are saying to allw any computer on the local network (in this case subnet 192.168.x.x) to connect to any database. The md5 indicates that the user must also supply a password.
# Allow local connections from local network host all all 192.168.0.0/16 md5
Restart the postgres service,
sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql-8.4 restart