Comments on Ubuntu 11.10 + saslauthd: SASL PLAIN authentication failed: no mechanism available

If you have to downgrade the saslauthd packages to get it working properly and later run "apt-get safe-upgrade" then saslauthd will be upgraded and it will break again. To prevent this you can configure dpkg to hold the saslauthd packages. Then you can safely upgrade using apt-get and not have to worry about it. Run the following commands to prevent sasl packages from being upgraded.

echo libsasl2-2 hold | dpkg --set-selections
echo libsasl2-div hold | dpkg --set-selections
echo libsasl2-modules hold | dpkg --set-selections
echo libsasl2-modules-sql hold | dpkg --set-selections
echo sasl2-bin hold | dpkg --set-selections

I also had to change /etc/postfix/sasl/smtpd.conf

pwcheck_method: saslauthd
mech_list: plain login pam
allow_plaintext: true
auxprop_plugin: sql
sql_engine: mysql
sql_hostnames: 127.0.0.1
sql_user: root
sql_passwd: topsecret
sql_database: database
sql_select: select password from emailUser where email = '%u'@'%r'

Afterwards you have to restart postfix / saslauthd

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

Hope this works for you.

I try both. First downgrade vrom saslauthd 2.1.24 to saslauthd 2.1.23

/usr/sbin/saslauthd -v
saslauthd 2.1.23
authentication mechanisms: sasldb getpwent kerberos5 pam rimap shadow ldap

I also try on 2.1.24 only change  /etc/postfix/sasl/smtpd.conf

 I have no more power :(

Yes, that worked GREAT!

Thanks for this extremely useful post!

 Editing the smtpd.conf and restarting services tested and confirmed working on Ubuntu 11.10 Perfect Server ISPConfig3.

well, that didn't work

Thanks Falko!

 It worked... Corrected the failure to send.

Works very well and solves problem on Ubuntu 11.10. Hopefully the new version of sasl2 will be bug-free.

Thanks doing that and rebooting fixed the problem.

Between the Auth problem and the bastille-firewall problem (var/run now /run), this has been a pain in the rear upgrade. :-(

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cyrus-sasl2/+bug/875440/comments/34

states that only some arguments in the config-file changed. Worked for me!

Because nobody was able to post the real working config file, here it is:

/etc/postfix/sasl/smtpd.conf

pwcheck_method: saslauthd

mech_list: plain login

allow_plaintext: true

auxprop_plugin: sql

sql_engine: mysql

sql_hostnames: 127.0.0.1

sql_user: ispconfig

sql_passwd: <yourpass>

sql_database: dbispconfig

sql_select: select password from mail_user where login = '%u@%r'

Work perfect without downgrading anything, just correcting the conf file but if you followed Falko's great How-To to install postfix with mysql, you have to change from:

to