I have a Dovecot installation on a Fedora 4. With the last update from Dovecot RC10 to Dovecot RC27, the daemon kills itself every night with this error:
Mar 17 05:23:11 mail dovecot: Time just moved backwards by 6 seconds. This might cause a lot of problems, so I'll just kill m yself now.
The error appears just after the night maintenance script executes a ntpdate syncronization
ntpdate is version 4.2.0a@1.1196-r
Well, 6 seconds are little more than a blink in human perspective, even if it is a long time for a computer point of view. Couldn't be possible to add a configuration option to avoid the suicide?
Any other option other than suicide is better, because there could be situations of really unattended servers.
Ciao, luigi
-- / +--[Luigi Rosa]-- \
She was a lovely girl. Our courtship was fast and furious. I was fast and she was furious. --Max Kauffmann
Den 19-03-2007 09:52, Luigi Rosa skrev:
I have a Dovecot installation on a Fedora 4. With the last update from Dovecot RC10 to Dovecot RC27, the daemon kills itself every night with this error:
Mar 17 05:23:11 mail dovecot: Time just moved backwards by 6 seconds. This might cause a lot of problems, so I'll just kill m yself now.
The error appears just after the night maintenance script executes a ntpdate syncronization
ntpdate is version 4.2.0a@1.1196-r
Well, 6 seconds are little more than a blink in human perspective, even if it is a long time for a computer point of view. Couldn't be possible to add a configuration option to avoid the suicide?
Any other option other than suicide is better, because there could be situations of really unattended servers.
Ciao, luigi
You could probably patch ioloop.c to accept more than 5 seconds of adjustment and then recompile. According to the commit[1] it seems IOLOOP_MAX_TIME_BACKWARDS_SLEEP determines a time limit in seconds, in which dovecot will hang waiting for time to get back to at least what is was (assuring that nothing is done "in the past".)
References: [1] http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot-cvs/2007-March/007948.html [2] http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2006-May/013641.html [3] http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2007-March/020369.html
-- Vennlig hilsen
Christian Skarby Interhost ANS
Christian Skarby said the following on 19/03/2007 10.40:
You could probably patch ioloop.c to accept more than 5 seconds of adjustment and then recompile. According to the commit[1] it seems IOLOOP_MAX_TIME_BACKWARDS_SLEEP determines a time limit in seconds, in which dovecot will hang waiting for time to get back to at least what is was (assuring that nothing is done "in the past".)
My point is: could Dovecot restart itself insted of killing itself?
Ciao, luigi
-- / +--[Luigi Rosa]-- \
Dr. No: East, West, just points of the compass, each as stupid as the other. --007 Dr. No
On 19.3.2007, at 11.48, Luigi Rosa wrote:
Christian Skarby said the following on 19/03/2007 10.40:
You could probably patch ioloop.c to accept more than 5 seconds of
adjustment and then recompile. According to the commit[1] it seems
IOLOOP_MAX_TIME_BACKWARDS_SLEEP determines a time limit in
seconds, in which dovecot will hang waiting for time to get back
to at least what is was (assuring that nothing is done "in the
past".)My point is: could Dovecot restart itself insted of killing itself?
That's not enough to fix all the potential problems, because the
future time may already be used in files' timestamps.
As others mentioned, using ntpd avoids this problem entirely.
Other nice option is using a true ntp synchronization which will not do that. Correct solution is when the time is slowly drifting time instead of big jumps. Running any ntp client in daemon mode should solve this.
Láďa-----Original Message----- From: dovecot-bounces@dovecot.org [mailto:dovecot-bounces@dovecot.org] On Behalf Of Luigi Rosa Sent: Monday, March 19, 2007 9:53 AM To: Dovecot Mailing List Subject: [Dovecot] Dovecot 'suicide'
I have a Dovecot installation on a Fedora 4. With the last update from Dovecot RC10 to Dovecot RC27, the daemon kills itself every night with this error:
Mar 17 05:23:11 mail dovecot: Time just moved backwards by 6 seconds. This might cause a lot of problems, so I'll just kill m yself now.
The error appears just after the night maintenance script executes a ntpdate syncronization
ntpdate is version 4.2.0a@1.1196-r
Well, 6 seconds are little more than a blink in human perspective, even if it is a long time for a computer point of view. Couldn't be possible to add a configuration option to avoid the suicide?
Any other option other than suicide is better, because there could be situations of really unattended servers.
Ciao, luigi
-- / +--[Luigi Rosa]-- \
She was a lovely girl. Our courtship was fast and furious. I was fast and she was furious. --Max Kauffmann
Hello Luigi,
Luigi Rosa, 19.03.2007 (d.m.y):
I have a Dovecot installation on a Fedora 4. With the last update from Dovecot RC10 to Dovecot RC27, the daemon kills itself every night with this error:
Mar 17 05:23:11 mail dovecot: Time just moved backwards by 6 seconds. This might cause a lot of problems, so I'll just kill m yself now.
The error appears just after the night maintenance script executes a ntpdate syncronization
ntpdate is version 4.2.0a@1.1196-r
Well, 6 seconds are little more than a blink in human perspective, even if it is a long time for a computer point of view. Couldn't be possible to add a configuration option to avoid the suicide?
I would not recommend using ntpdate to regularly adjusting the clock. Use ntpd or openntpd instead. Both adjust the time in "slighter" steps than ntpdate does: They work by accelerating or slowing down the system clock so that there won't appear "time jumps" as you mentioned them.
Gruss/Regards, Christian Schmidt
-- Leute, die selber Zwiebeln essen, können nicht gut beurteilen, ob andere Zwiebeln gegessen haben oder nicht. -- Thornton Niven Wilder
participants (6)
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Christian Schmidt
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Christian Skarby
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Luigi Rosa
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Láďa
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Marc Perkel
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Timo Sirainen