Basically, what I have is Dovecot authenticating against the passwords stored in the LDAP Server, rather than the built-in OS X accounts' password system. And then I get Postfix to use the LDAP authentication so set up, for its own SMTP authentication. And it works, with or without SSL.
I did so many things and tried so many variations, so now I have to take a step back and figure out just what I did to make this work. Then I will make new versions of MailServe and the LDAP Enabler that will do all this for the user with just one click on their respective Enablers.
Actually I might have gotten most of this working in Chengdu last week, so it was a pretty productive week, even though I was traipsing around Chengdu.
I think what I didn't realise, until I got back to Singapore, was that the PAM module for LDAP that I was using, pam_ldap.so, needs to be built again for the x86_64 processor that is the default in Mountain Lion. I was using a pam_ldap.so that was a fat PPC/i386 binary - absolutely useless on Mountain Lion - and that explains the crashes whenever PAM was called which was whenever a user tries to authenticate against the LDAP Server. I banged my head against the wall so many times in Chengdu. It only cleared when I got back to Singapore, and then it became crystal clear what the problem was. It's a mystery how the mind works.
