[Dovecot] Return error instead of dying on time back skip?

[jalal]

On 11/05/07, Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 2007-05-02 at 10:52 +0200, Amon Ott wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> I think this is just way too much trouble for handling a situation that
> really shouldn't be happening in the first place.. The code already
> allows the clock to move backwards by 5 seconds without dying, so how
> horrible are the clocks in those computers? :)
>
> It's anyway easy to increase that time by modifying the sources.
> src/lib/ioloop.c IOLOOP_MAX_TIME_BACKWARDS_SLEEP
>
>
Just to add that I've also been bitten by this upon updating from rc18 to
1.0.0. My current kludge is to restart Dovecot in a cron till I try
recompiling/fixing it.

I'm running under a Virtuozzo VPS and there is no way to run ntp. The
underlying server is ntp sync'd anyway and that gets passed up to the VPSs.
So this shouldn't really be happening. It usually kills itself after about
40-50 minutes of running (although the time varies) so Dovecot is 'seeing'
over 5 secs of slippage in an hour, which is unlikely.
FWIW, I run a couple of servers with Virtuozzo and no other software has
registered a problem.

cheers
jalal