Subject: saslauthd bind mount fails during boot

From: Daniel Pocock <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 02 Jul 2013 19:59:05 +0200

Package: postfix
Version: 2.9.6-2
Severity: important

As per the wiki, I've got a bind mount in fstab:

/var/run/saslauthd /var/spool/postfix/var/run/saslauthd none bind 0 0

This has been working for quite some time (over 1 year)

However, since upgrading to wheezy, I've observed that this is not
mounted during booting and consequently Postfix fails to authenticate
any SMTP submission clients.  The logs contain messages like this:

SASL LOGIN authentication failed: generic failure
warning: SASL authentication failure: cannot connect to saslauthd
server: No such file or directory

and the boot log contains:

[....] Mounting local filesystems...mount: special device
/var/run/saslauthd does not exist

Manually running

mount /var/spool/postfix/var/run/saslauthd
service postfix restart

fixes the issue.

The root cause may be associated with the sequence of mounting /var and
the /var/run tmpfs.  mount tells me that /var/run is mounted like this:

tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,size=52088k,mode=755)