[Dovecot] Time moved backwards errors

[Tom Diehl]

On Thu, 2 Apr 2009, Mark Hedges wrote:

>
>
> On 2009 Apr 02 (Thu) at 12:49:43 +0100 (+0100), Bloke wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I am experiencing a number of 'Time moved backwards errors' such as:
>>
>> Mar 27 11:38:20 host-78-129-239-60 dovecot: imap-login: Time just moved backwards by 729 seconds. This might cause a lot of problems, so I'll just kill myself now. http://wiki.dovecot.org/TimeMovedBackwards
>> Mar 27 15:20:10 host-78-129-239-60 dovecot: Time just moved backwards by 4214 seconds. This might cause a lot of problems, so I'll just kill myself now. http://wiki.dovecot.org/TimeMovedBackwards
>> Mar 29 11:08:59 host-78-129-239-60 dovecot: imap-login: Time just moved backwards by 4341 seconds. This might cause a lot of problems, so I'll just kill myself now. http://wiki.dovecot.org/TimeMovedBackwards
>>
>> on my Centos 5.2 openvz - based VPS
>>
>> I have raised the issue with my VPS provider, who are
>> responding that 'the jury is still out' as to whether this
>> is a system, or Dovecot problem.
>
> FWIW I saw this the other day on a real-machine CentOS 5.2
> system after a severe crash in which the system put all the
> drives into read-only mode.  The machine had to be
> power-cycled and dovecot complained the clock was off by 5
> minutes.  Maybe something else going on with the 2.6.18
> kernel?  Dunno.

I see this all of the time on an EL4 machine when it is under high load.
The clock is synced to ntp but I still get dovecot killing itself. 
Sometimes ntp looses sync but not always.

I have a cronjob check every 5 minutes to see if dovecot is running and if
not restart it. I know that is not the right answer and I hate things like that
but until I figure out how to fix it or upgrade the machine (coming soon) I
will live with it.

I am just throwing this out in case it means anything to someone else.

FWIW dovecot version == dovecot-1.0.3-14

Regards,

-- 
Tom Diehl		tdiehl at rogueind.com		Spamtrap address mtd123 at rogueind.com