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