Ben Kevan’s Blog

Lotus Notes Error “Network operation did not complete in a reasonable amount of time” Resolution

I was working from home yesterday (had a dentist appointment to get my root canal crowned, and 2 fillings) and ran into an issue with Lotus Notes when I tried to send an email. Basiclly it failed with “Network operation did not complete in a reasonable amount of time”. But wait, pings never get lost, reverse dns is fine (wasn’t sure if notes did a reverse check when you sent or not) and my connectivity within VPN is perfect. So I pull out wireshark (which is a great packet troubleshooting program if you’ve never used or heard of it) went to send my mail and got:

So I checked out the packet and found:

So when I send the packet it has an MTU size of 1500 and I never get it back. My guess is it hit the firewall, went through (with some possibly destination information) and got blocked on its way back. The re-transmissions were obviously because the client didn’t get the packet back.

So I lowered my MTU for my vpn device tun0 (you can find your device that vpn is on by running ifconfig or /sbin/ifconfig if /sbin is not in your $PATH).

To lower your MTU run:

sudo ifconfig tun0 mtu 1300

started a sniff, resent and all was good.

Tags: lotus notes, opensuse, troubleshooting

Installing IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 Beta on openSUSE 11.0

IBM has recently released a public beta of Lotus Notes 8.5 which will have many improvements and features above what the 8.0 family will give. I went to the beta site and was overjoyed to see they had RPM, DEB and their standard installer avaliable (about time IBM, about time). After I was overcome with joy, I decided to uninstall the current version of 8.0.1 and go ahead and install 8.5 via RPM package which was easily enough:

sudo rpm -ivh ibm_lotus_notes-8.5.i586.rpm

It installs, runs post installation scripts, and I go ahead launch and configure it. Not only does it have a smaller memory footprint so far, but for some odd reason it looks so much better (havn’t dug into why I think it looks better, but the fonts are much better). I notice that the sametime integration isn’t there, so I install the sametime package that came with the RPMS downloads with

sudo rpm -ivh ibm_lotus_sametime-8.5.i586.rpm

Setup sametime and was back up and running in no time FLAT. I haven’t done too much with it, other then send some emails and chat on sametime a little bit (sametime is still 8.0, even though the installer says 8.5).

Here is a list of all the RPM packages that are included:
ibm_lotus_activities-8.5.i586.rpm
ibm_lotus_sametime-8.5.i586.rpm
ibm_lotus_cae-8.5.i586.rpm
ibm_lotus_symphony-8.5.i586.rpm
ibm_lotus_notes-8.5.i586.rpm

I may install activites and symphony at some point, but right now I wouldn’t use them.

Keep posted I’ll write a wiki for installation at some point.

Note: although I have not tested with Lotus NOtes 8.5, you will probably need the following package for the application to work correctly:
libgnomeprintui

Tags: ibm, lotus notes, opensuse