Here’s an obscure problem with an even more obscure solution. This drove me crazy all day today.
In trying to set up SMTP AUTH on DebtX’s new mail server, I decided to use SASL for authentication. When I tried to create a new user in sasldb using saslpasswd, the app just hung there, never writing any data to /etc/sasldb.
After hours of searching for a solution, I found this on The FAQChest:
Subject: Solution: saslpasswd hangs ( cyrus-sasl-1.5.24-17 )
From: “Greg Waehner”
Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2002 16:21:31 -0500
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Thanks to a whole host of people, I’ve find the problem and answer.
saslpasswd uses /dev/random even if “auto_transition=yes” is NOT in your config files.
/dev/random uses audio, keyboard, and mouse input from the host. In my case,
there is no keyboard, no mouse, and no audio. I access the server via SSH, and as such, /dev/random never returned info. to saslpasswd.
Thus, the hang.
Solution: make /dev/random a symlink /dev/urandom
Implementation:
( as root )
cd /dev
rm random
ln -s /dev/urandom random
Thanks again to everyone who helped out.
Greg Waehner
