saslpasswd Hang Solution

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
——————————————————————————–
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