One of our primary mail servers crashed late this morning - the server that processes mail for approx 40% of our (approx 6,000) employees....has to be completely rebuilt (ouch!)... glad I'm not an Exchange Admin, but...

I'm planning to reboot the BES when they get everything back up and running, to ensure a good connection to Exchange.....anything else I may want to watch for (BES 4.0.6, Exchange 2003, SP2)?

Seems like the BES would treat this as a normal downtime when they do maintenance on the Exchange server - BES just can't see it, only this time for 7 hours instead of 30 minutes.

It all depends on how Exchange is being brought back to life.

If it is being restored from a database backup and transaction logs played forward it'll look like an extended outage.

If they do a dial-tone mailbox recovery the mailboxes will be created, but with no BB information in them.

I'd HIGHLY recommend finding out exactly what procedure is being followed and use that TSupport contract.

I think they used the database backup method after having the server rebuilt. Exchange was back up around 5:30pm, with old emails came to my Outlook client just fine (with varied timestamps starting at the time of the outage). The BES had a lot of errors in the application log, so I rebooted it and after 5-10 minutes I received the missing email on my BB.

Long day for them, though.

Thanks for the PM hdawg!