sporadic "generic failure" with sasl pwcheck

[Ferdinand Goldmann]

Hello there,

I am using Cyrus 2.2.12 together with SASL 2.1.21 for an installation with
several thousand users. The pwcheck daemon queries passwords which are stored
in a FreeBSD spwd.db file. From time to time, I am seeing things like this:

Jun 19 12:41:40 leia pop3[76204]: badlogin: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx [193.171.x.x]
plaintext xxxxxxxx SASL(-1): generic failure: checkpass failed

"generic failure"? If someone types in a wrong password, the log usually reads
"authentication failure".
Logins are working fine, the generic failures just pop up sporadically. Has
anyone else witnessed such a behaviour? I suspect it might be related to high
system load, or the pwcheck daemon not answering fast enough, or the spwd.db
file being locked while it is being rebuilt during useradd operations. But I'm
a bit unsure about it.

Any ideas?

TIA
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