Blackberry servers - BES

Blackberry Enterprise Servers (BES) are, frankly, a nightmare to maintain. When they work, they are low stress, but when they fail, they are pretty much impossible to fix without a lot of time & effort.

I think that this is mainly due to the totally user hostile attitude of RIM, the makers of BES who want paying for all support calls and who, ulike Microsoft, don't both to maintain any serious Knowledge Base of issues.

So as someone who is often asked to fix obscure BES issues, here are a few of my favorites.

Everything has been working fine and when the Windows 2003 server is rebooted, BES breaks.

1.Do Not Panic!
2.Do not start editing files, or changing settings.
3.Do you run a DNS serevr on the W2003 box?
4.If so, stop it, restart BES - it will now run - and then restart DNS.
It appears that sometimes DNS uses a port which BES uses and so if DNS gets there first, BES sulks.

Brilliant!