[Dovecot] Time jumped forwards

Dave Stevens geek at uniserve.com
Sat Jan 15 02:41:58 EET 2011


Quoting Ian B <porjo38 at yahoo.com.au>:

>
> --- On Fri, 14/1/11, Tom Hendrikx <tom at whyscream.net> wrote:
>>
>> I had this problem too when I setup a VMware guest last
>> month (noticed
>> through strange spikes in munin's ntp monitoring, not
>> through dovecot
>> logs). After some research I found out that I had VMware
>> time
>> synchronisation (host to guest) enabled, and NTP in the
>> guest running.
>> The ESX host clock was some 90+ seconds behind, so VMware
>> stalled my
>> clock once in a while, after which NTP corrected it again.
>>
>> I asked the ESX admin to fix the clock, but disabled the
>> VMware
>> synchronisation and now use only ntp in the guest. Never
>> looked back.
>>
>> So in stead of 'ticking all the boxes', explain your setup.
>> You have NTP
>> enabled, but what does VMware do?
>
> Thanks for the post. I've checked my setup - the guest is not set to  
> sync with the VMware host. NTP is running with local clock server  
> commented out & 'tinker panic 0' set.
>
> It sounds like this is not a Dovecot issue so I'll stop posting to  
> this list now and seek help elsewhere.
>
> What negative effects to Dovecot would I expect to see where the  
> system clock is constantly changing?

my experience with CentOS/Dovecot was that when the clock is reset  
back, Dovecot writes a message into /var/log/messages saying, IIRC,  
"Time just went backwards. This could cause problems so I'll just kill  
myself now." And mail transport stops.

A horrid nuisance to debug. I don't know about it changing in the  
other direction.

Dave
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-- 
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
   Krishnamurti



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