One of my clients uses squirrelmail for their email. Today I added the change_passwd plugin, which relies on poppassd on the backend to make it work. If anyone has a better way, I’d love to hear about it.

After downloading and installing the plugin, the first clue I had to do more was when I tried to change a password from within squirrelmail. Doing so gave me the message Error: Connection refused (111). Hmmm. The config file for the plugin was set to use poppassd on the backend, and a google search suggested the obvious, make sure poppassd was installed and listening on port 106.

I followed the instructions on the poppassd site, first downloading then compiling the source as per their instructions. So far so good. To get poppassd to listen on port 106, I needed xinetd, so I ran yum install xinetd, then created a poppassd config file for xinetd… here’s my /etc/xinetd.d/poppassd:

service poppassd
{
        disable = no
        socket_type             = stream
        protocol                = tcp
        wait                    = no
        user                    = root
        server                  = /usr/local/bin/poppassd
        only_from               = 127.0.0.1
        log_on_success  += HOST DURATION
}

Then /etc/init.d/xinetd start had me up and running, as confirmed with netstat:

# netstat -an | grep 106
tcp 0 0 :::106 :::* LISTEN