If it is a WAN setup, or operating through the slow link with high latency you can raise the timeout values in the server options... Don't have the console in front of me right now, but there are settings for heartbeat (which are used only if you use alias failover) and another set of timing values. Try playing with them and see if it helps.
The message just tells you that the server is not responding.

I changed the time values and it worked.