[Dovecot] Dovecot 'suicide'

[Christian Schmidt]

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 at 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

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