CentOS - May 2008 - saslauthd for sendmail SMTP relay

Hi,

I'm running a Centos 5.1 server that uses saslauthd to allow sendmail
SMTP relaying for some clients. saslauthd is configured to use method
"shadow" to lookup the username / password directly from /etc/shadow.
This setup has been working for several month now, but is broken since
last Monday. I haven't changed anything neither on the server nor on
the clients. Now whenever a client tries to relay email I see this
messages in the logs:

/var/log/maillog:
AUTH failure (LOGIN): authentication failure (-13) SASL(-13):
authentication failure: checkpass failed

/var/log/messages:
saslauthd[3665]: do_auth         : auth failure: [user=username]
[service=smtp] [realm=] [mech=shadow] [reason=Unknown]

Does someone have an idea how to debug this further, esp. how to find
the real reason as the message [reason=Unknown] is not very helpful at
all.

Thanks in advance,
Bernd.

Bernd Bartmann wrote:
> /var/log/maillog:
> AUTH failure (LOGIN): authentication failure (-13) SASL(-13):
> authentication failure: checkpass failed
>
> /var/log/messages:
> saslauthd[3665]: do_auth         : auth failure: [user=username]
> [service=smtp] [realm=] [mech=shadow] [reason=Unknown]
>
> Does someone have an idea how to debug this further, esp. how to find
> the real reason as the message [reason=Unknown] is not very helpful at
> all.
>
>   
Is saslauthd still running?  Could it have failed or not started if the 
server has rebooted?

Ian