BES

Security hole - BES PDF vulnerability

If your a BES admin, here is something you should be aware of.

 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/28/…

Blackberry - Missing seperate icon for secondary mail account

If you have a blackberry that has been activated on a BES server and then set up a BIS email account as well you will get a second mail icon on your blackberry that is just for your BIS account.

However if you ever need to wipe and reactivate the blackberry the second mail icon will not automatically reappear and all mail for both BES and BIS will flow into the one mail folder,

To get the second icon back just go into Email Setup on the blackberry. Log into your BIS account and select the option to “Resend Service Books”, this will resolve the issue.

Switching VM’s over to a different Virtual Center breaks connection between BES and Exchange server

We had an issue with our BES server stop working properly. Some mail was getting to users but there were errors sending mail and we couldn’t activate any new users.

Here was the error when trying to activate.

{e} MAPIMailbox::MAPIMailbox(2) - OpenMsgStore (0×8004011d) failed

A reboot of the exchange server followed by a reboot of the BES server fixed the issues but we weren’t sure if this was a coincidence or caused by switching the VM’s over to a different Virtual Center server

Shortly after that we moved over a different set of Exchange server and BES servers and the exact same issue occurred.

Be aware!

BES - Email not syncing properly

I have been troubleshooting a BES issue with a user whose email isn’t syncing properly. Some email sync’s fine and others not at all. I found this useful article that explains it really well.

 http://www.bbhub.com/2007/01/08/bes-admi…

Missing seperate icon for personal mail on a blackberry after it is wiped and re-activated

I have encountered this issue recently with users missing the seperate icon for their personal mail (gmail, yahoo mail etc ..) after there blackberries have been wiped and all of their mail is going into there message folder.

After doing some investigation I found that this issue is caused by a problem with IT policy on the BES sever. On your BES, open your IT policy go into the section called “service exclusivity policy group” and make sure all the options are set to default. After that resend the IT policy and service books to the effected blackberry users and have them restart and this should resolve the issue.

Unable to activate a single user in BES

I just experienced this issue, I had a user that i could not activate. It kept coming up with the a generic “An error occured, please contact your system administrator” error. I ensured that all the proper security persmissions for the BES admin account were set. I was able to activate other users fine using the same blackberry. No errors in the event log. Rebooting the BES and Exchange server didn’t help.

Here is what I did to resolve this:

1) Remove the exchange attributes from the account and then delete the account

2) Create a new account without an exchange mailbox

3) In Exchange system manager run the mailbox cleanup agent which marks the old mailbox as orphaned

4) Re-connect the exchange mailbox to the new account

Voila, activated like a charm

Moving users to a second BES

A little note on something I found working with BES. In this situation  we had an existing BES server and added a second one to the enviroment with the intent to move users over. During this process of deleting and purging users of the old server and adding an account to the server I found that the status of the account on the new server auto generates the PIN and changes it’s own status to Running, though it doesn’t actually work and activations fail. I found I needed to wipe the handheld before adding the user to the new BES before I could make it work.

Useful Utility for BES - HandheldCleanup

I encountered an odd issue yesterday. One of my users got a new blackberry, I removed and purged them from the BES and then set them up again for activation. However it would not activate. At first I thought it might be the blackberry but low and behold I was not able to activate them on our spare blackberry either. I created a test user and activated them fine so I knew it wasn’t a global problem with the BES server but I rebooted the BES server in any case but still no go.

I eventually resolved the issue by running handheldcleanup -u command. This exectuable is located in the utility folder of the Blackberry installation folder (C:\program files\research in motion\blackberry enterprise server\utility\handheldcleanup.exe). This command cleans up the BES database of any old data needing to be purged.

Blackberry - Calender not syncing on BES

Here is an issue I dealt with today. A user’s blackberry wasn’t synchronizing properly. Messages came through fine but not calender items. A check of the BES server showed everything fine in terms of settings. Here was the resolution, go into the blackberry, into calender, into options. Look for wireless synchronization, make sure it’s on, if it is on, turn it off, pull the battery. After you boot it back on, turn the wireless sync back on. Hope this helps.