I've been fighting with Dovecot and Postfix for nearly 3 days now - I need some help!...

It seems Dovecot is not generating the private/auth file required for connections.

Mail.log

Sep  6 21:55:55 suncoastshores postfix/smtpd[11278]: warning: SASL: Connect to private/auth failed: No such file or directory
Sep  6 21:55:55 suncoastshores postfix/smtpd[11278]: fatal: no SASL authentication mechanisms

ls -l /var/spool/postfix/private/

srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 Sep  6 22:26 amavis
srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 Sep  6 22:26 anvil
srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 Sep  6 22:26 bounce
srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 Sep  6 22:26 bsmtp
srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 Sep  6 22:26 defer
srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 Sep  6 22:26 discard
srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 Sep  6 22:26 dovecot
srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 Sep  6 22:26 error
srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 Sep  6 22:26 ifmail
srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 Sep  6 22:26 lmtp
srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 Sep  6 22:26 local
srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 Sep  6 22:26 maildrop
srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 Sep  6 22:26 mailman
srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 Sep  6 22:26 proxymap
srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 Sep  6 22:26 proxywrite
srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 Sep  6 22:26 relay
srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 Sep  6 22:26 retry
srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 Sep  6 22:26 rewrite
srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 Sep  6 22:26 scache
srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 Sep  6 22:26 scalemail-backend
srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 Sep  6 22:26 smtp
srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 Sep  6 22:26 tlsmgr
srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 Sep  6 22:26 trace
srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 Sep  6 22:26 uucp
srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 Sep  6 22:26 verify
srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 Sep  6 22:26 virtual

Hostname

hostname
suncoastshores
hostname -f
suncoastshores.suncoastshores.com

Dovecot Main.cf (snippets)

# SASL parameters
# ---------------------------------
 
# Use Dovecot to authenticate.
smtpd_sasl_type = dovecot
# Referring to /var/spool/postfix/private/auth
smtpd_sasl_path = private/auth
smtpd_sasl_auth_enable = yes
broken_sasl_auth_clients = yes
smtpd_sasl_security_options = noanonymous
smtpd_sasl_local_domain =
smtpd_sasl_authenticated_header = yes


# General host and delivery info
# ----------------------------------
 
myhostname = suncoastshores.suncoastshores.com
myorigin = /etc/hostname
mydestination = suncoastshores.suncoastshores.com, localhost

10-master.conf (snippet)

  # Postfix smtp-auth
   unix_listener /var/spool/postfix/private/auth {
   mode = 0660
   user = postfix
   group = postfix
  }

What am I missing? Why won't Dovecot generate the private/auth file?

Generally, dovecot will log errors about why it can't or didn't create that file in either mail.log or wherever it is set to log to. You might want to investigate that.

Unfortunately the log file wasn't giving any more information that what I posted however, I changed auth_socket_path in 10-mail.conf to auth_socket_path = /var/run/dovecot/auth-master and now the private/auth file has been created.

Now I'm getting a Connection Refused message..

Sep  7 10:42:03 suncoastshores postfix/smtpd[19153]: warning: SASL: Connect to private/auth failed: Connection refused
Sep  7 10:42:03 suncoastshores postfix/smtpd[19153]: fatal: no SASL authentication mechanisms

My head's going to explode...

Solved by adding the following to the service auth section of /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-master.conf

  unix_listener auth-master {
    mode = 0660
    user = vmail
    group = vmail
  }