time just moved backwards

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1

My users have been complaining about pop access not working. This, as it turns out, is because dovecot was not running. I can easily start it manually but don’t want the problem to arise in the first place.

After looking through maillog I saw a message, “Jun 29 23:59:50 cserver dovecot: Time just moved backwards by 17 seconds. This might cause a lot of problems, so I’ll just kill myself now. http://wiki.dovecot.org/TimeMovedBackwards”

And following through to the wiki gives me information about a wonky time server synchronization issue. The time server sync is set up in Webmin System Time to run every night at midnight so the message seems to have been generated right on time. It isn’t clear to me what is the best course, should I eliminate time synchronization? or do it better somehow? or what?

I found this thread: http://www.virtualmin.com/node/10167 but don’t know whether to apply it in my setup.

The unit is a xen virtualized domain, domU, and the advice from the dovecot wiki is to run this only on dom0 and then have guest domains sync to that. But this is rather complicated, does anyone have a suggestion?

Dave

2

Howdy,

Yup! That thread applies to your setup… it sounds like your time is wandering a bit too much, and sync’ing the time once a day is probably causing the time jump too much.

What you’d probably want to do is either have it run more frequently, perhaps once an hour… or even better, just use the NTP daemon, which makes more gradual changes that won’t startle Dovecot into shutting down :slight_smile:

-Eric