/usr/share/doc/libsasl2-2/ Current File: //usr/share/doc/libsasl2-2/README.Debian
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