Hi people,
From: Adam McDougall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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.
My point exactly. It's amazing how some people are quick to ramble about
someone else's administrative incompetence without taking time to read the
situation. (One person even suggested hacking the dovecot startup script to
run ntpdate -- useless as ntpd already occupies the ports).
Fact is, ntpd can take unpredictable delay before the initial time-step.
Delay that can't be controlled, and it would be unreasonable to delay
starting mail services until it is guaranteed to complete. Then, dovecot
dies, and admin (who is not always immediately available) has to start it
manually anyway (especially as it is not clear what to do with possibly
unsynced timestamps) -- only after the unnecessary downtime.
So, the question is: why on earth can't we add a single line of code to
dovecot to restart itself after terminating?
Kind of reminds me of the "fsck_y_enable=YES" option in rc.conf. Without it,
if fsck does not like someting during reboot, the server would just sit
there in single-user prompt, waiting for (expensive) console operations.
Best wishes
Eugene
