[Dovecot] dovecot: Fatal: Time just moved backwards by 3603 seconds.

Stephen Feyrer steve at toth.org.uk
Sat Aug 16 02:41:16 EEST 2008


Daniel L. Miller wrote:
> Stephen Feyrer wrote:
>> <nervous_darting_eyes> Hi Everyone. </nervous_darting_eyes>
>>
>> Ooops I just broke my dovecot install.
>>
>> I've looked through the mailing list archives and not found anything 
>> relevant.
>>
>>
>> When I try to connect to my mail server I get this message.
>> "Could not connect to mail server chen.home.org; connection was refused"
>>
>>
>> The last message in /var/log/mail.err is:-
>>
>> Aug 13 21:02:27 chen dovecot: Fatal: Time just moved backwards by 3603 
>> seconds. This might cause a lot of problems, so I'll just kill myself 
>> now. http://wiki.dovecot.org/TimeMovedBackwards
>>
>>
>> It seems this is my own fault.  Time on my system is a little wonky so 
>> I reset the time and then I found out I'd broken Dovecot.  I didn't 
>> realise that doing this would have an impact on dovecot.  I read the 
>> web page and to be honest I'm not confident about hacking source code.
>>
>> I've reinstalled dovecot which worked except it hasn't solved my time 
>> travel problem.
>>
>> By the way since my first install of dovecot the config file seems to 
>> have changed a little but since I've tried to migrate my settings over 
>> the new file and been met with the same problem I don't think it's that.
>>
>> Is it possible to get dovecot working again?
> What happens when you try to start Dovecot again?  Not re-install - just 
> start it.
> 

I just did this to show you.

# /etc/init.d/dovecot restart
  * Stopping dovecot ...        [ ok ]
  * Starting dovecot ...        [ ok ]

And then this...

# dovecot -n
# 1.1.1: /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf
listen: [::]
ssl_ca_file: /etc/ssl.ca/myca.pem
ssl_cert_file: /etc/ssl.ca/newcerts/email.cer
ssl_key_file: /etc/ssl.ca/private/email.key
ssl_cipher_list: ALL:!LOW:!SSLv2
ssl_verify_client_cert: yes
verbose_ssl: yes
login_dir: /var/run/dovecot/login
login_executable: /usr/libexec/dovecot/imap-login
mail_location: maildir:~/.maildir
auth default:
   ssl_require_client_cert: yes
   ssl_username_from_cert: yes
   passdb:
     driver: pam
     args: *
   userdb:
     driver: passwd
   socket:
     type: listen
     client:
       path: /var/run/dovecot/auth-client
       mode: 432
     master:
       path: /var/run/dovecot/auth-master
       mode: 384
       user: root
       group: root

And then this again...
  # /etc/init.d/dovecot restart
  * Stopping dovecot ...         [ ok ]
  * Starting dovecot ...
Warning: Last died with error (see error log for more information): Time 
just moved backwards by 106 seconds. This might cause a lot of problems, 
so I'll just kill myself now. http://wiki.dovecot.org/TimeMovedBackwards 
                [ ok ]

I've not seen this before in a restart.

That was followed by...
# /etc/init.d/dovecot restart
  * Stopping dovecot ...        [ ok ]
  * Starting dovecot ...        [ ok ]


--
Regards

Stephen.
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