Sendmail+sasl+pam - A recipe for a headache.
Talk about a royal PITA! I wanted this new server to do smtp_auth and ssl. Started out simple enough… just a ‘USE=”-mysql authdaemond” emerge -av sendmail cyrus-sasl‘. At first every thing looked happy… Then I tried to send mail. Thunderbird just sat there asking me for my password over and over… Needless to say I spent the last eighteen hours trouble shooting this problem and getting much closer the the nitty gritty of sendmail, something I never realy wanted to do… Well after banging my head on my moniter a few time and turning up debugging… I noticed the sasl was trying to authenticate with pam as a smtp service… up to this point, I had been examining the saslauthd file in the /etc/pam.d/ directory. Upon realizing this I figured I would try something crazy, and did a ‘cd /etc/pam.d/ && ln -s saslauthd smtp‘, which informed pam how to authenticate something claiming to be a smtp service. I then turned around and tested again ( I have lost track of how many times I tested up to this point.). I was quite surprised to see sendmail take the email and relay it to one of my other accounts! Mission acomplished!