#1110485 sasl2-bin: saslauthd.service does not manage several saslauthd instances as /etc/init.d/saslauthd did

Package:
sasl2-bin
Source:
sasl2-bin
Description:
Cyrus SASL - administration programs for SASL users database
Submitter:
Luc Maisonobe
Date:
2025-08-08 08:49:01 UTC
Severity:
normal
#1110485#5
Date:
2025-08-06 20:05:58 UTC
From:
To:
Dear Maintainer,

*** Reporter, please consider answering these questions, where
appropriate ***

   * What led up to the situation?

Upgrading from bookworm to trixie.

   * What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
     ineffective)?

In bookworm, I had two configuration files : /etc/default/saslauthd and
/etc/default/saslauthd-postfix. The second file used a Unix socket in
the postfix chroot, as recommended in
https://wiki.debian.org/PostfixAndSASL

This worked in bookworm, where saslauthd was launch using the script
/etc/init.d/saslauthd,
which takes care to list all configuration files starting with the
prefix saslauthd
within directory /etc/default.

I kept this configuration when upgrading to trixie.

   * What was the outcome of this action?

The second configuration (saslauthd-postfix) is not started anymore.
If I run "systemctl status saslauthd", I see 5 saslauthd processes that
correspond to the configuration in /etc/default/saslauthd. The 5 other
processes
I used to see and that did correspond to the /etc/default/saslauthd-
postfix
instance are not started anymore.

   * What outcome did you expect instead?

I expected 10 processes to be run, 5 with one general configuration,
and
5 with a configuration running in postfix chroot.

The /etc/init.d/saslauthd seems to still be shiped in the package (it
just
seem to not use a "START=yes" test anymore as it did in bookworm). It
seems
however that it is not used at all, and that only the
/usr/lib/systemd/system/saslauthd.service
file is used, and this file references only a single configuration file
/etc/default/saslauthd,
hence ignoring the second configuration file.

*** End of the template - remove these template lines ***

#1110485#10
Date:
2025-08-08 08:38:25 UTC
From:
To:
The workaround I finally used was to create a custom service file,
separated from the original one shipped in the sasl2-bin package:

root:/etc/systemd/system# cat saslauthd-postfix.service
[Unit]
Description=SASL Authentication Daemon for postfix
Documentation=man:saslauthd(8)

[Service]
Type=forking
Group=sasl
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/saslauthd -a pam -c -m
/var/spool/postfix/var/run/saslauthd -n 5

[Install]
WantedBy=postfix.service
root:/etc/systemd/system#

Note that I had to remove both the PIDFile entry and the
RuntimeDirectory entry as they didn't play well with the
chroot jail directory specified in the -m option.
I also replaced the WantedBy=multi-user.target from the original file
by WantedBy=postfix.service.



best regards,
Luc