Can’t make Dovecot communicate with Postfix using SASL (warning: SASL: Connect to private/auth failed: No such file or directory)

Solved. I will leave this as a reference to other people, as I have seen this error reported often enough on line.

I had to change the path

smtpd_sasl_path = private/auth

in my

/etc/postfix/main.cf

to relative, instead of absolute. This is because in Debian Postfix runs chrooted (and how does this affect the path structure?! Anyone?)

—

I am trying to get Dovecot to communicate with Postfix for SMTP support via SASL. the master plan is to be able to host multiple e-mail accounts on my (Debian Lenny 64 bits) server, using virtual users. Whenever I test my current configuration, by running

telnet server-IP smtp

I get the following error on mail.log

warning: SASL: Connect to /var/spool/postfix/private/auth failed: No such file or directory

Now, Dovecot is supposed to create the auth socket file, yet it doesn't. I have given the right privileges to the directory private, and even tried creating a auth file manually.

The output of

postconf -a

is

cyrus
dovecot

Am I correct in assuming from this that the package was compiled with SASL support?

My dovecot.conf also holds

      client {
        path = /var/spool/postfix/private/auth
        mode = 0660
        user = postfix
        group = postfix
      }

I have tried every solution out there, and am pretty much desperate after a full day of struggling with the issue. Can anybody help me, pretty please?