News:Blastn remote times out, resolved in version 2.12.0

Question

[agb465]

Just sharing my experience in the hope it will be helpful to someone...

I was frustrated when running blastn 2.6.0 using the -remote option as a result of getting this error response on multiple Ubuntu machines:

Error: NCBI C++ Exception: T0 "/build/ncbi-blast+-GcQwD4/ncbi-blast+-2.6.0/c++/src/serial/rpcbase.cpp", line 244: Error: ncbi::CRPCClient_Base::x_Ask() - Failed to receive reply after 3 tries

A Biostars post indicated 2.7.1 works, but I got the same result when I tried that. Then I upgraded to the lastest blastn, version 2.12.0, and it worked! Hopefully consistently.

[GenoMax]

While this is useful to know v.2.6 is 5 years old.

blast+ introduced a new format for blast databases (v.5) with blast+ v.2.8.1. This may have been the main problem why you were getting those errors.