[Dovecot] Time moved backwards ....

[tomas at tuxteam.de]

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On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 06:08:04PM +0200, Harry Lachanas wrote:
> tomas at tuxteam.de wrote:
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>> On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 05:17:18PM +0200, Harry Lachanas wrote:
>>   
>>> OK..
>>> So I synced  the clock....
>>> and got ....
>>>
>>> dovecot: Time just moved backwards by 1 seconds. I'll sleep now until 
>>> we're back in present. http://wiki.dovecot.org/TimeMovedBackwards
>>>
>>> ( The first time I did this the clock moved backwards 2 hours after a 
>>> timezone change and dovecot suicided )

That shouldn't happen: the clock of your server should be UTC and
*independent* of the time zone! The time zone should be used to display
times (I'm assumig an Unix-like server here -- no clue about other OSes).

>>> I think I understand the concept ...
>>> However a mail server should probably be synchronized to the local time   
>>>   
>>
>> You don't really mean what you are saying, I think. Anyway: what do you
>>   
> of course I do .....
> The server I was talking about was a test server, fresh install, and I 
> corrected the time zone ....
> So If U are offended, I am sorry ....

No, I'm not, don't worry :-)

> On the other hand if U have NOT something real to share .... please do not 
> answer .... at least with an empty answer ....

See below: I did propose two ways of coping with this: rebooting
(implicitly) and adjusting softly the clock.

> I haven't reached the point where a summer or winter time change happened 
> ... :-) , yet .........
> I would hate the moment that I would have to explain to my users that they 
> have to wait  for a couple of hours ....
> until the server wakes up again ...!!!!

Well -- I tried to point out alternatives. See, this problem comes up in
this list time and again, and I just wanted to say that dovecot *really
can't do anything about it*. It's a general problem with servers.

And there seems to be more problems if you talk about changing time just
because you need to change the time zone. And you shouldn't go about
changing your clock when summer time comes.

Don't hesitate to ask if all this is mumbo-jumbo to you (but off-list,
please, as it's quite off-topic by now)

Regards
- -- tomás
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