Hello,

We have had the following problem for three days now and after searching the net for hours and trying various things I am still be unable to get it to work.

The situation is as follows. We have one user (who happens to be the boss of the company) and we're unable to activate his Blackberry. The Blackberry worked for months without any problems then suddenly it could no longer receive or send mails. So we deleted the user from the BES, added him back in and wiped his Blackberry but whenever we try to activate it, it always hangs at various points - 0%, 11%, 22%, 55% etc and goes not further. (Sometimes it gets to a certain point eg 55%, then goes back to 0% then goes no further.) The BB always contacts the server a few minutes after starting activation but then never contacts it again and even if we leave it for several hours the activation never completes. About 10 mails appear on the BB but that's all. We are unable to perform a lookup from the handheld.

We have tried three different BB's and get the same results. All handhelds work if we activate a different user.

We are runing Lotus Domino 8.5.1 and BES 4.1.6 MR 6 so last night I upgraded to 4.1.7 MR 3 and we still have the same problem. We have tried all the fixup, updall and compact commands several times on the users mailbox and even tried replicating the mailbox to a PC, deleting it from the server and replicating it back again. We have removed the user and added them back into the BES countless times, wiped the various handhelds countless times and tried activating him countless times and still have the same problem!

I'm at a complete loss.

The BES and the Domino server where this user has his mailbox are at different locations and are connected by a low speed link which I know is not ideal. However we are able to activate other users located at this site.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Many thanks!

Delete his state database. That could be causing your problem. You may have multiple state databases on the BES for him as well. The conflict is causing the device to wig out.

Yep, done all that many times. Everyime we delete him, we also delete the state database.

Is the user's mail file very large? How about the address book?
If the databases are very big, then that could certainly be an issue since your BES and Domino server are separated by a slow link. What's the latency on that connection?

His mail file is 5GB so yes it is very large but we've not had problems activating before. We activated someone last week who works at that location and their mailfile is 6GB. We also have some users with even larger mail files at another location and they activate without this problem.

If I ping from the BES site to the other site, the response times vary from 40ms to 110ms at the moment.

Also set the address book and memo synchronization to NO. After EA is successful, then set it to yes.
The EA is getting hung on the service books for those databases.
KB11639-Enterprise activation process stops responding during synchronization of the memo list or contact list
The KB may say Exchange, but it still applies to Domino in theory.

DarthBBerry - Yeah, we'd already set address book and memo synch to No. (or False)

The only other thing I can think of is to completely wipe the device, remove the OS and reload from scratch. Then do the same for the user on the server side. With removing them from the BES and deleting the state DB, also go into the SQL table and delete the entry.

DarthBBerry - remember we've tried three different Blackberries. We've also successfully activated other users with these BB's so I can confirm that it's not the handhelds.

We also delete the state DB everyime we delete the user and we've done this many times whilst trying to fix this problem. I have also deleted the user out of the SQL table a few times.

As you can see, I've tried quite a lot of things and nothing has worked. I think there might be some corruption in the users mailbox which is causing the activation to not complete. I've ran the various Domino fixup, updall and compact commands which supposed to fix corruption but we still have the problem.

I am fast running out of ideas.

Call RIM T-Support. (Especially because of who the user is.)

Even after all that, it is really starting to sound like a mailfile issue. :(

well thats a novel idea!

Penguin, DarthBBerry, many thanks for your help! We're going to try a few other things and then call RIM Tech Support if we still can't fix it. However I think it is a mailfile issue.

Hey davemason75, firstly I want to point out that there is a difference between:-

(1) A 5GB mail file with hundreds of messages in Inbox (redirected folder) + many calendar entries & contacts
(2) A 6GB mail file with a well house-keeped Inbox (redirected folder) + a relatively lesser calendar entries & contacts

Activation on the 6GB may actually take a shorter time.

From what you described, it sounds like there may be hung threads working on that user's mail file. Try searching "No Response" in the MAGT logs and see if they are for this user. If yes, please stop activation, wipe and removed that user. Then do this:-

(1) Housekeep his mail file - the lesser the messages in Inbox and other redirected folders, the better.

(2) Removed unwanted messages in other folders to reduce the mail file size

(3) Lastly, perform Domino maintenance on the mail file (KB02207) to reduce whitespace, rebuild view index and fix corrupted documents which may cause hung threads.

Once done, readd him back to BES and activate.

Noname - many thanks this seems to have resolved it!! We archieved all mails pre-2010 and this reduced his mailbox to 2.4GB. We ran fixup, updall and compact commands again on his database then tried to activate him and this time it worked. It did however take two hours when it normally only takes 10 to 20 minutes but at least it's working, that's the main thing!!!