On Wed, 13 Aug 2008, Peter Schober wrote:
> well, this just says what you already know: that PAM and saslauthd
> cannot talk to slapd on localhost. what it does not say, is why,
> because you're looking at the wrong logfile.

Thanks Peter, this turned out to be LDAP corruption (solution was in the 
SDB, I missed it first time round). Touch wood, the problem has not 
occurred since I performed an LDAP repair.

Regards

Mark