VMware Tanzu Application Service for VMs errand deploy-notifications fails with "server timeout"

Products

• Operations Manager

Issue/Introduction

The deploy-notifications errand of  your VMware Tanzu Application Service (TAS) for VMs deployment might fail with the error "server timeout" when it tries to verify SMTP configuration.

The following are detailed log messages of the error:

2019-12-06T02:00:48.76+0000 [APP/PROC/WEB/1] OUT {"timestamp":"1575597648.766086102","source":"notifications","message":"notifications.smtp-connect-errored","log_level":3,"data":{"error":"s
erver timeout","trace":"goroutine 1 [running]:\ngithub.com/pivotal-golang/lager.(*logger).Fatal(0xc0001ced20, 0x55aa6cf03d17, 0x14, 0x55aa6d3e17e0, 0xc0001bcc30, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0)\n\t/tmp/app/vendor/github
.com/pivotal-golang/lager/logger.go:131 +0xc5\ngithub.com/cloudfoundry-incubator/notifications/application.Application.VerifySMTPConfiguration(0xc000026098, 0x25, 0x55aa6d2d93fb, 0x1, 0x0, 0x3, 0xc0000a
6200, 0x77, 0xc000034013, 0xa7, ...)\n\t/tmp/app/application/application.go:90 +0x4ed\ngithub.com/cloudfoundry-incubator/notifications/application.Application.Run(0xc000026098, 0x25, 0x55aa6d2d93fb, 0x1
, 0x0, 0x3, 0xc0000a6200, 0x77, 0xc000034013, 0xa7, ...)\n\t/tmp/app/application/application.go:60 +0x65\nmain.main()\n\t/tmp/app/main.go:19 +0x20b\n"}}

Environment

Product Version: 2.5

Resolution

Check if STARTTLS is enabled on the SMTP server and whether STARTTLS is enabled on the "Email Notifications" pane of the TAS for VMs tile setting page.

Make sure the SMTP port number on TAS for VM is set to the same value as on the SPTM server. If STARTTLS is enabled, usually port 587 should be used instead of port 25 but you still need to confirm on the server.

Or

If it's configured on TAS for VMs tile to use SMTP, but the server indicates that it supports STARTTLS. In this case, the notifications app will error out since the server supports STARTTLS but the notifications app doesn't use it.

Note: There are also a few edge cases where the server reports to support STARTTLS but there are other issues with it. Unfortunately, there isn't a good workaround in this case because there is no way to bypass that behavior in notifications app.