[Dovecot] Time moved backwards

[Adam McDougall]

Charles Marcus wrote:
> On 5/13/2008, Eugene (genie at 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.