Blackberry Enterprise Server - Not running?

Question

My BlackBerry enterprise server recently stopped forwarding messages to devices. In fact, the server claims that the last time it communicated with all the devices associated with it, was on Thursday night (4 nights ago.)

The catch is this, the Exchange server is running properly (or as properly as Exchange can run :) ) The SQL server seems to be running properly. And the Blackberry Enterprise server seems to be running correctly.

Other than the fact that the server has not communicated with any device since Thursday, and the fact that I am not getting messages, there appears to be nothing wrong.

How do I get these message to be forwarded to devices again?

I have restarted the BES services in the order suggested by the BlackBerry folks to no avail.

Answer 1

generally, I find troubleshooting BES server to be a bit tricky, but this is probably because I just don't have that much experience except for the setup - for the rest, it just seems to work.

having said that, the steps I would follow:

• check connectivity to the exchange server from the blackberry server and the other way round. check if anything has changed/installed on the exchange server or BES server

• check event logs on the BES server. send a BES message to your handset from the BES Manager on the server, see if an error is generated. if the message arrives, the network portion is ok. check an email version of the same (also from the manager) - this will isolate the issue to network or internal exchange issue

• on the server, in program files\research in motion\blackberry enterprise server\utility (unless installed elsewhere) is a permissions checker called 'IEMSTest.exe' - run it from the command line, select the correct profile and test against one of the mailboxes that should work. it will spit out any permission errors that occur

usually one of these three give me something to work with (and invariably in my case it's the last one - permission issues) - but given your environment was running, unless it's a change that's been made on the exchange server it's unlikely.

The only other gotcha I've come across is that if a user is granted windows admin permissions, send as permission breaks. this had me hunting for a while last time it happens.

hope this helps, YMMV

Answer 2

Thank you for your suggestions... It turns out that this was a firewall issue. I had update the software on the firewall during the previous day, essentially cutting off contact between my blackberry server, and the blackberry network.

Total bone-head move on my part.

Thank you all for your suggestions.