[Dovecot] Return error instead of dying on time back skip?

[Amon Ott]

Hello everybody!

Currently, dovecot just kills itself if it detects that time has moved 
backwards more than a hardcoded number of seconds. I accept the 
reasons, but I do not like to restart dovecot manually after waiting 
for time to move forward again. A cron job would not help, because 
time might still be wrong when it restarts dovecot.

All our systems run ntpd, but they might be offline for a while before 
they get contact to a time server, e.g. because of DSL problems. When 
they do get contact and time is too far off, ntpd sets the new time 
directly (yes, it could gradually do that, but it might take ages).

Now I wonder if Dovecot could return errors to the users instead of 
dying until time is fine again, e.g. "System time has moved 
backwards, please come back in n seconds". If the time skip is just a 
few seconds, it can of course delay and then go on as it does now. 

With this change, no admin would be needed to carefully restart 
Dovecot at the right time. I have not looked into Dovecot code myself 
yet, but could try a patch if necessary.

Amon Ott
-- 
Amon Ott - m-privacy GmbH
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