I have evolution 2.12.1 installed on Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) along with the evolution-exchange plugin on my home desktop and laptop. For some time now, I’ve been unable to figure out why I can connect to exchange with no problems from my desktop, but not from my laptop. All operations using evolution on my laptop would take several minutes, or sometimes it seemed like everything would grind to a halt, leaving evolution completely unusable. I spent some time last night trying to get to the bottom of things, and stumbled across a thread that helped me make some progress. Thanks to joshmachine’s suggestion to start evolution with the E2K_DEBUG environment variable, something like
$ export E2K_DEBUG=4; evolution
I could view some exchange connector debugging output to figure out that evolution was timing out when trying to connect to the global catalog server I had configured. It turns out that this was the one setting these machines didn’t have in common! When I cleared the setting, everything worked flawlessly…well, almost. Now I have to figure out what’s causing the connection to the directory server to fail.
Something to add to the never ending list of things to do:
- Figure out why there isn’t a command line option in evolution to enable or increase the verbosity of debugging output for evolution and it’s plugins.
May 21st, 2008 at 5:18 pm
I also have a serious performance problem with Evolution and the Exchange connector. My Inbox is normally retrieved reasonably fast and I can open mails and attachments. However……. When I try to reply to a message, Evolution stalls completely. The harddisk is very active but I have no clue what it does. Something like retrieving a global address list perhaps? This is a very large list so could take a some time. I have never seen the process finish, always hard-reset the PC after a minute or 10 or 15. How can I prevent Evolution from trying to retrieve the Global Address List??
Thanks for any help, Michiel
May 26th, 2008 at 10:52 am
Michiel, the first thing I would try is to limit the number of responses from the Global Catalog server. There’s a checkbox for this in your account settings that should be checked. You could also try reducing the number provided by that setting. It defaults to 500 messages, but you may see some better performance with the number reduced. Worst case, you may need to set the Global Catalog server setting blank, which helps in the cases where the address is incorrect or if the server cannot be reached.
The issue I was running into was that the active directory server could not be reached from outside the school network without a VPN connection. If I left the active directory (Global Catalog server) setting blank, the machines wouldn’t time out trying to reach the AD server. Our security group decided not to support Linux when they setup the VPN and I’ve been working lately to add this support. Now, with a successful VPN connection and the Global Catalog entry filled in with our AD server address, everything seems to work fine.