Cyrus on CentOS with sasl / pam / ldap
Encountered similar problem with CentOS 5.8 today after upgrading some packages including openldap, nss, kernel, etc. In my case pam do not even connect to LDAP server. Did not discovered reasons yet. But found a workaround - told saslauthd to connect directly to LDAP, not via PAM, by changing MECH=pam to MECH=ldap in /etc/sysconfig/saslauthd.