This post is out of sequence but I told myself I’d throw it up while it’s still fresh. About a month ago I redid my entire email server from scratch when I started having some hardware issues. This post is on one of those bug-a-boos of switching from a physical server to a virtual world. TIME. Seems keeping vmguests synchronized with the correct time is an issue and wrecks havoc upon Dovecot (even when vmware tools are installed!) So, one of solutions was to not only install the vmware tools on my vmguest but to also install ntpd. This is good and bad…

  See, ntpd checks the time rather frequently and all it takes is a sync of > 75 seconds and Dovecot kills itself. Thankfully, it left a message in the log file.

dovecot: Time just moved backwards by 109 seconds. This might cause a lot of problems, so I’ll just kill myself now. http://wiki.dovecot.org/TimeMovedBackwards: 1 Time(s)

The URL provided in the error message was very illuminating and gave some recommendations from there. I installed the script that used lsof and was pretty much good to go. I did a couple of tests to ensure it wasn’t just restarting it once per minute then did the old crontab -e command and placed the script in the root’s cron jobs file stored at /var/spool/cron/root. Life is good. I’ve always been a big fan of netstat but lsof also gives some very valuable information on tracking down rogue issues.