Cyrus SASL for Debian --------------------- SASL is the Simple Authentication and Security Layer, a method for adding authentication support to connection-based protocols. This is the Debian package of Cyrus SASL, which is an implementation of SASL by Carnegie Mellon University. The package stays as close as possible to the upstream version, but some changes have been introduced to fix known issues and to better integrate the software with the Debian system. For example, some command line utilities have been renamed with a "sasl" prefix, in order to avoid naming collisions. The software has been split into several packages, so a system administrator can choose what functionality to install and what to leave out. IMPORTANT: You MUST install one of the libsasl2-modules* packages for SASL to work with server programs. Otherwise server software like Postfix and Cyrus IMAPd will not allow any users to log in, and other SASL apps will malfuntion in weird ways. If you do not intend to use SASL on your server, then the libsasl2-modules* packages are not necessary for you. SASL automatically logs debug information to syslog's auth.debug facility. This is not something that can be disabled through a configuration option to libsasl2-2 itself. The default syslog configurations in Debian result in these messages going to /var/log/syslog and /var/log/auth.log. If you wish to send the SASL debug messages elsewhere, you can add a line like this: auth.debug /var/log/auth.debug To throw the messages away: auth.debug /dev/null Additional information can be found here: http://www.cyrusimap.org/docs/cyrus-imapd/2.4.8/install-configure.php SASL uses /dev/urandom, which doesn't block when the system runs out of entropy. However, when the system does run out of entropy, the random numbers that /dev/urandom emits are slightly less cryptographically secure. If you are concerned about this, then please turn to the kernel documentation or other sources to determine what this means in your case. In practise, /dev/urandom is just fine for the vast majority of cases. If you want to use /dev/random for whatever reason, you have to recompile the packages. (Change --with-devrandom in debian/rules.) Use dpkg-statoverride to change the permission and the ownership of the saslauthd socket /var/run/saslauthd and the sasldb user database /etc/sasldb2. For more information on saslauthd, see the README.Debian in the sasl2-bin package. For more information about SASL, please see http://asg.web.cmu.edu/sasl/, and for more information about Cyrus SASL, see http://asg.web.cmu.edu/sasl/sasl-library.html. Also see the following RFC documents, which are currently not distributed with the Debian packages: rfc1321.txt rfc1939.txt rfc2104.txt rfc2195.txt rfc2222.txt rfc2243.txt rfc2245.txt rfc2289.txt rfc2444.txt rfc2595.txt rfc2831.txt rfc2945.txt rfc3174.txt The project information page http://pkg-cyrus-sasl2.alioth.debian.org/ contains details about the Debian packaging project. All comments and bug reports are welcome, please use the Debian Bug Tracking System to submit them. -- Fabian Fagerholm <fabbe@debian.org>, Fri, 9 Jun 2008 21:08:07 +0300