How to increase the timeout for AlarmNotifier to connect to SMTP host

Products

• Network Observability
• Spectrum

Issue/Introduction

Sometimes, the AlarmNotifier is not always able to send emails out due to SMTP lag in responding. Is there a way to increase the time out that the SpectroSERVER connects to the SMTP host for AlarmNotifier in a Windows based Spectrum environment?

Environment

DX NetOps Spectrum all currently supported releases

Cause

AlarmNotifier depends on the OS mail program to connect and send mails via SMTP. So to configure a timeout between it and the SMTP server, you will need to configure it in the line that calls that OS mail application in the AlarmNotifier SertScript.

Resolution

As an example, if you are using Sendmail in Windows, then to test if a timeout is needed, what you can do is try to test the mail application from the command line with a timeout added:

• Syntax: mail.exe -o timeout=<seconds> ...


• Example: mail.exe -f [email protected] -t [email protected] -o timeout=120 ...

 

Separate to the timeout between AlarmNotifier mail and the SMTP server, you can also try to adjust the .alarmrc Timeouts to Increase the communication timeouts between AlarmNotifier and the SpectroSERVER.

You can do this in the $SPECROOT/Notifier/.alarmrc file to ensure the process doesn't disconnect while waiting for a slow mail transfer:

• • VNM_MAIL_TIMEOUT=600000 (10 minutes)
  • VNM_CONNECT_TIME_LIMIT=60000 (1 minute)

These two parameters are described in:

TechDocs : DX NetOps Spectrum 25.4 : Customizing the .alarmrc Resource File

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