[Dovecot] Using dovecot auth with Postfix

[Kim Culhan]

Attempting to setup smtpd auth for Postfix using the Dovecot authorization
unix socket.

Some info is at: http://www.postfix.org/SASL_README.html

To enable operation when Postfix is chrooted, a method from the
reference above is to locate the socket at: /var/spool/postfix/private/auth

To do this, I have this configuration in dovecot.conf:

# listener sockets will be created by Dovecot's master process using the
# settings given inside the auth section
auth default_with_listener {
  mechanisms = plain
  passdb passwd {
  }
  userdb pam {
  }
  socket listen {
    master {
      path = /var/spool/postfix/private/dovecot-auth-master
      # WARNING: Giving untrusted users access to master socket may be a
      # security risk, don't give too wide permissions to it!
      mode = 0600
      # Default user/group is the one who started dovecot-auth (root)
      user =
      group =
    }
    client {
      path = /var/spool/postfix/private/dovecot-auth-master
      mode = 0660
    }
  }
}

With this configuration Dovecot writes this to the log at startup:

dovecot: Dec 31 17:04:32 Error: child 3536 (auth) returned error 89
dovecot: Dec 31 17:25:34 Error: Auth process died too early - shutting down
dovecot: Dec 31 17:25:34 Error: auth(default_with_listener): Unknown
userdb driver 'pam' (typo, or Dovecot was built without support for
it? Check with dovecot --build-options)

Before modifying the setup for this auth function, pam authentication was
working fine.

Also, Dovecot will make /auth owned by root which Postfix
considers a 'fatal' problem. Should it be setup to run as user Postfix ?

Any help here is vy appreciated

-kim

--
w8hdkim at gmail.com