[CentOS] Pam problems

[Craig White]

On Feb 23, 2012, at 8:54 AM, Steve Campbell wrote:

> Seems I've found that dovecot is handling the auth for smtp, and it 
> doesn't like sendmail very much since their documentation avoids 
> sendmail like the plague.
> 
> I sure wish Centos/RH had left something for us so that I wouldn't have 
> to learn dovecot, postfix and all the other stuff. The original tests I 
> ran seemed to handle most of the stuff normally but now users are 
> calling and complaining and there's not a lot I can do but forge ahead.
> 
> Not happy but it's my own fault
> 
> Thanks for the help
----
I've stayed out of this thread because I like many others moved from sendmail to postfix many years ago as it is much simpler to deal with external resources such as LDAP & SASL authentication and thus had little to offer in terms of help without the relatively useless suggestion that you should likewise switch from sendmail to postfix. Note that the default SMTP server now on CentOS is postfix which I take as yet another sign that a majority of people have moved on to postfix too.

That said, it seems certain that sendmail is capable of doing SASL authentication (TLS/SSL/Plain) so the choice is yours.

You should be able to indicate to cyrus-saslauthd to use pam (/etc/sysconfig/saslauthd) and thus you would need to configure sendmail to listen and handle connections on the various ports (587 and perhaps 465 for Outlook users) and to use cyrus-saslauthd but to be honest, that's something I solved long ago using postfix (and LDAP users too). SASL would normally use 'PLAIN' authentication but it can be wrapped with TLS or SSL for encryption.

Good luck

Craig