Connect to private/dovecot-auth failed

About

A more complete and generalized version of this message is:

servername nss-mysql[number]: warning: SASL: Connect to pipe failed: No such file or directory

Where:

servername is the network name of the machine generating the error
number is an integer, significance unknown (it seems to be a standard thing in mail.log files)
pipe is the filespec of a pipe for communication between Postfix and Dovecot, typically "private/dovecot-auth"
- (is "pipe" correct, or do I mean "socket"? not sure.)

In one particular scenario, it is preceded by an SMTP connection attempt from a remote server, and followed by a fatal: no SASL authentication mechanisms error message.

Oct 3 07:42:32 rizzo nss-mysql[26619]: warning: SASL: Connect to private/dovecot-auth failed: No such file or directory

Oct 3 07:42:32 rizzo nss-mysql[26619]: fatal: no SASL authentication mechanisms

Oct 3 07:42:33 rizzo postfix/master[4272]: warning: process /usr/lib/postfix/smtp

In this particular case, a fix involved the following:

ls /var/spool/postfix/private
look for pipe with "auth" in the name
modify Dovecot's dovecot.conf file so that the auth default section includes at least the "client" section shown here, but with the "path" parameter pointing at your actual auth pipe.

If that doesn't work, go to the Postfix and Dovecot web sites and read up on SASL, especially this section.

This gives more information about configuring Postfix for secure SMTP authentication in Group-Office
Make sure the file referred to by postfix's main.cf is the same file referred to by dovecot's dovecot.conf. They had been the same, but when I checked them just now, one had apparently been updated from "auth-dovecot" to just "auth" and this was causing error messages in the log and some emails were being silently rejected. --Woozle 17:12, 11 February 2011 (EST)