felipe-alfaro.org

Care must be exercised when using testsaslauthd to check whether SASL authentication is working and saslauthd is configured to use PAM:

# cat /etc/sysconfig/saslauthd
SOCKETDIR=/var/run/saslauthd
MECH=pam
FLAGS=

By default, testsaslauthd test whether the authentication process works by invoking authentication onto the imap service, unless the -s service is passed along in the command-line. PAM configuration for the imap service is stored in /etc/pam.d/imap. However, if cyrus-imapd is not installed, the file /etc/pam.d/imap won’t exist and thus any try to use testsaslauthd against the default imap service will fail:

# ls -l /etc/pam.d/imap
ls: /etc/pam.d/imap: No such file or directory

# testsaslauthd -u felipe.alfaro -p password
0: NO "authentication failed"

# tail /var/log/messages
May 20 16:36:47 mail2 saslauthd[2626]: do_auth
: auth failure: [user=felipe.alfaro] [service=imap]
[realm=] [mech=pam] [reason=PAM auth error

# testsaslauthd -s login -u felipe.alfaro -p password
0: OK "Success.