Hi All

I have been hanging around in here for a few weeks now and the site has helped me with a few problems so far in which I thank the mods and other supporters.

I work for a company which has approx 300 BB's, now the BES server is on the other side of the country (I am in Perth, Western Australia and the server is in Sydney, New South Wales) in head office. Over the last week I have witnessed about half a dozen BB's (7230 and 7100g) all of a sudden stop receiving and sending emails. GPRS is activated, calls can be made to and from the phone, the lookup function intermittantly works.

This problem is only happening in my office and because I am all the way over the other side of the country it doesn't seem important enough for our admin to help investigate.

What I have done to fix the problem is to totally wipe the hand held with enterprise activation sometimes taking up to 6 hours to complete, wait over night and when I come in the next day the BB is functioning correctly. I have talked to the telco we go through and pin to pin messaging works fine and I can do a HRT register and that works ok.

We are running the same hand held software that other offices are using. I also believe that we have BES v4 running....

If anyone has had ANY experience with this please feel free to post it in here. Any info I am happy to provide but am limited what I can get to as I don't have access to the BES server.

The BES server is supposed to have a RAM upgrade from 512 to 1gb this weekend but I don't see how that is going to help.... would there be something jaming the emails from coming through perhaps? Anything that I could go back to the admin and ask him to look at would be helpfull and much appreciated.

Thanks
BigKimbo

My BES admin recently showed me command line tools which can track the logs to see exactly the route a message takes to determine bottlenecks in the message delivery. If you have desktop manager installed you can check the redirector and see if you have messages pending.

hey when it's not sending messages is it giving you a red X? If so, open that message and tell us what it says in the "Message Status" part of the email.

IT is a strange breed for the most part. No department likes to admit something is their problem. We're all guilty for that.

Sounds like it is their issue though, or at the very least an issue with the service provider's coverage in that area.

As we have issues similar to your own, with our BES at our corporate headquarters, I have to ask if your Exchange server is on your site or is it in Sydney where the BES is located?

ok, I had to give the BB back to the user so he could at least use the phone function of the BB then at about 1 am the next day the emails started to flow through! wtf is up with that?!? I will try to get the BB off the user and run some tests. It looked like the BES server had the proposed upgrade on the weekend so I will monitor the performance over the next week.

Earth: I will try to get a BB that is playing up and check the properties of a failed sent message. cheers.

Careyana: Every office has it's own exchange server so to answer your question he logs into the Perth exchange while the BES is in Sydney.

BigKimbo, depending on the latency between the Perth office and the Sydney office, that is likely the issue. From your PC, try and ping the physical computer name of the BES server or an Exchange server located in Sydney and see what the reply times are. Really anything higher than the mid-2-digits is going to be too high. We have Exchange servers all over the nation for our Enteprise BES (we have a local BES for my business unit as well). For these users, we simply move their mailboxes from whichever Exchange server they are on to a centralized Exchange server and designated BlackBerry-labeled information store. Outlook is a LOT better at handling latency (especially in Cached Mode) than actual real-time messaging relay services such as BES.

Otherwise, the BES's proximity would have no real affect on delivery to your handheld, but it's really the Exchange server's placement that throws up a red flag. If you had some sort of MPLS network between the Sydney and Perth offices, then it really wouldn't matter, though, as latency times would be very minimal. However, if these are two completely separate networks with fairly small pipes to the 'net, then I would definitely say that would be where I'd start looking first.

Also, you mentioned the memory upgrade. In all honest, if the Attachment Service is on the BES, and if you have Mobile Data Service enabled, then expect 512MB to be a fairly good example of an issue, as well. Even the 1GB mark is too little for 300 users. I'm running 2GB of RAM in each of my BES servers, and we only have 150 at most on one of them (about 110 on another). I've never had any performance issues, though. However, I will be upgrading to 4GB, most likely, when I upgrade to 4.1 in production.