[Dovecot] Time moved backwards

[Scott Silva]

on 5-13-2008 12:13 PM Adam McDougall spake the following:
> 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.
> 
This would be a good case for running ntpdate on startup at least on the ntp 
server. Just point it to a reliable outside server. AFAIR RedHat and clones do 
this in the init script for ntpd.

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