change server time, dovecot dead

Webmin
1

hi there

i realized just recently that our server time is off track by 30 minutes! don’t know how this could happen, but we do not have a sync with external ntp running, which is no good.

i tried to change this via:
->webmin-> hardware-> system time-> time server sync

but apparently this leads to problems with dovecot, i can not restart the service (on shell):
Restarting IMAP/POP3 mail server: dovecotLast died with error (see error log for more information): Time just moved backwards by 1801 seconds. This might cause a lot of problems, so I’ll just kill myself now. http://wiki.dovecot.org/TimeMovedBackwards

Can anyone give me some hints how i can switch time and even better implement ntp sync properly.

The server is hosting some 50 mail accounts and not so critical web-content, it’s easy take it offline for a couple of minutes, planed of course.

best
marc

2

Howdy,

Dovecot does indeed dislike the server time changing drastically… however, it should immediately be able to start back up after making such a change.

You may want to try starting that up again now, maybe NTP was still working.

If you use Webmin’s time server sync, and schedule that run once an hour – it should make more gradual changes, and wouldn’t affect Dovecot in that same way.

-Eric

3

will give this a try. as long as i can always switch back and restart it’s not that problematic.

will post results, if anyone has similar issues.

thanks eric