[Dovecot] dovecot: Fatal: Time just moved backwards by 3909 seconds.

[Udo Rader]

Udo Rader wrote:
> Charles Marcus wrote:
>> On 11/30/2009, Udo Rader (listudo at bestsolution.at) wrote:
>>> The virtual guest is Centos 5.4 based with dovecot 1.2.8 (at first we
>>> also tried with the original 1.0.7 (?) dovecot shipped with Centos).
>>>
>>> I wrote "alleged time shift" because there is no timeshift
>>> whatsoever, or at least I don't notice it anywhere else.
>>>
>>> ntp is - of course ;-) - up and running and no other applications
>>> have time troubles and I've even disabled the local clock as a time
>>> reference.
>>
>> Of course you know not to use ntp on VMs, only on the host, right?
>>
>> :)
> 
> heh, ok, ship hit an sunk :-)
> 
> I was absolutely not aware of a "clocksource" kernel parameter, what a 
> weird thing ...
> 
>  > Revent kernels should be able to keep the VM time synced using kvmclock
>> clocksource...
> 
> So I'll give clocksource=acpi_pm a chance and see how it turns out ...

So for the sake of other peoples' nerves also facing this problem, the 
solution was to add "divider=10" as a kernel boot parameter.

There is an good post about this problem here:

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=211100

and this also leads to this document for VMWare giving an indication of 
what the suggested parameters for various distributions are:

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1006427

cheers!

-- 
Udo Rader, CTO
http://www.bestsolution.at
http://riaschissl.blogspot.com