Blackberry Enterprise Server stopped working with MES2007

[phadobas]

Hi all,

I'm coming from a Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES, version 5.01) problem, and my troubleshooting steps start to point me towards an issue with Exchange Server 2007. For those who are not that familiar with BES, it's an application suite running on Win Server 2003 (in my case at least) and manages different features of the Blackberry cell-phones my company issues to its employees. This BES server needs to have an Exchange Server to work with.

About a month ago, certain functions of the BES stopped working. Namely, the 'last contact date' field (where is shows when last the BES could talk to a Blackberry) stopped updating. Also, when I try to activate a new bb, I can't, as the server comes up with an error message.If you are very familiar with BES, I also note down here that IEMSTest comes back with the following error message:

"OpenMsgStore() for this profile failed (8004011d)"

As for the Exchange Server side of the things, the log files in the c:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\Mailbox\First Storage Group\ folder stopped being generated (every day, there used to be many 1,024KB size files generated, but nothing since that day).

I do admit that on that day, I turned off the Windows swap file (which later I turned back on), I also disabled disk compression (so the computer went through a whole de-compress cycle), and on top of all that, I also ran disk-defrag.

In the Event Viewer of the Exchange Server, under Application, there is an error generated every minute, with Event ID 4001, with a long coded message about how it can't open a Mailbox blah-blah-blah. I don't know if it's helpful to quote that message here, but I can do that if it helps anyone.

I have been at this problem for almost a month, went to different Forums on BB website, other bb related sites, followed a few KB articles even from the Microsoft website, but couldn't get it going again.

Can anyone please help?

Thank you

 

[ntinlin]

Presumably normal user e-mail is working ok?
Are e-mails getting to / from the Blackberry's even if the Last contact date isn't being updated?

It's possible that the following are screwed:-

1. Blackberry service account mailbox
2. BES MAPI profile
3. Security permissions to all mailboxes for the BES service account

Check the RIM site for the installation guide for the latter, check you can access the service account mailbox from another machine using the service account login and using an Outlook profile.
To recreate the MAPI profile see RIM docs.

However if the EX server isn't generating logs files it sounds like it may have got circular logging turned on somehow.

Are your DB logs and database itself on the C: drive? They should always be on at least a separate drive and preferably on at least two different drives. And you should NEVER EVER use windows defrag on Exchange files.

What happens if you try and push out a policy or service book update to the handheld? That would be completely separate from the e-mail side.

Neill

 

[phadobas]

Hi ntinlin,

Thanks for checking this for me. First off, I managed to fix the problem yesterday )))

What you had suggested was what I've been checking in the last month or so.

While I had the problem, I was able to push out policy changes to the BB-s. Second, on the BESX, the database file is on C drive. And yes, I'm afraid the Defrag had messed things up.

I ran the Exchange's built in Database tools to find the database in "Dirty shutdown" state and un-mountable.

It was more and more obvious that the culprit was the Exchange Server (MES). I spent the last 2-3 days just reading KB articles one after the other and learned a lot from them. Eventually I did many different attempts to recover my database that had "out of date" log files, and was un-mountable. Before I did any change, I backed up the whole folder though. Eseutil is now a good friend of mine ))

Anyways, what really worked was deleting all the log files and leaving the actual database file all by itself in the folder and then run the database repair utility. I actually didn't care a whole lot about the actual data contained in the database, as I'm not using MES to really handle our emails. It's just a requirement to have for BES to work. So after that database repair all functionality of the BES was restored.

I now have a Virtual Machine installed and I'm playing around with BES Express. I just want to get rid of the Exchange Server all-together as I'm using Zimbra.

But thanks for your help.