Fixing postfix and saslauthd: cannot connect to saslauthd

If you are having issues getting postfix email server to authenticate with saslauthd, your solution might be found in a missing symlink. Remember that postifx runs in a chroot environment.

I find the following warning message in /var/log/mail.log:

warning: SASL authentication failure: cannot connect to saslauthd server: No such file or directory

The warning message tells me that saslauthd can’t be located. The real location is /var/spool/postfix/var/run/saslauthd, but postfix is expecting to find it in /var/run/saslauthd. Create a symlink as described below and see if that fixes your problem.

sudo ln -s /var/spool/postfix/var/run/saslauthd /var/run
sudo chown root:sasl /var/spool/postfix/var/run/saslauthd
sudo usermod -a -G sasl postfix

Be sure to restart postfix and saslauthd.

sudo /etc/init.d/postfix restart
sudo /etc/init.d/saslauthd restart

After restarting saslauthd, you should see some of the following files in /var/spool/postfix/var/run/saslauthd:
cache.flock cache.mmap mux/ mux.accept saslauthd.pid

Test using your smtp client and verify that you no long receive the previous warning message in your mail.log file. Hopefully this was your quick fix.

Fixing postfix and saslauthd: cannot connect to saslauthd

3 thoughts on “Fixing postfix and saslauthd: cannot connect to saslauthd”

  1. It works, but unfortunately the symlink does not survive a reboot of the server.

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