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 Am Köllnischen Park 1, 10179 Berlin Tel: +49 30 24342334 Fax: +49 30 24342336 Web: http://www.m-privacy.de Handelsregister: Amtsgericht Charlottenburg HRB 84946 Geschäftsführer: Dipl.-Kfm. Holger Maczkowsky, Roman Maczkowsky GnuPG-Key-ID: EA898571