on 5-13-2008 12:13 PM Adam McDougall spake the following:
Charles Marcus wrote:
On 5/13/2008, Eugene (genie@geniechka.ru) wrote:
I guess terminating all current connections and restarting all processes would be pretty safe, but it's not really a high priority change for me..
Nevertheless, it would be very nice if you could fix it. It's a fairly big availability problem (for us, at least).
The problem is not so much how dovecot deals with this issue, the problem is, why is your server having such drastic problems keeping its time sane?
Fix that, and your problem disappears.
I would just like to mention a circumstance that happened to me this Sunday. We had a total power outage in our building, longer than our UPS's could last and we don't have a generator for servers (nor is it economical or needed). When the power came back on, my local NTP server came on at the same time as my mail servers, as well a majority of my other servers. My servers tried to step their time to be in sync with my local NTP server, which was still busy trying to sync itself with outside sources, which takes a while, so my mail servers did not get an answer. Later, dovecot died because the time finally synced, and I found out why pretty quick (have seen this before) but this was an unusual situation. My point is, we had an unusual circumstance, and even though I've taken steps to have my mail servers sync their time at boot and run ntpd afterwards, there are some circumstances in which this is not enough, and dovecot still died. Its not always because someone was lazy about their time setup. But it doesn't cause me "big availability problems" since in general, my time is fine.
This would be a good case for running ntpdate on startup at least on the ntp server. Just point it to a reliable outside server. AFAIR RedHat and clones do this in the init script for ntpd.
-- MailScanner is like deodorant... You hope everybody uses it, and you notice quickly if they don't!!!!