Multiple BES Problems
 

Our Exchange server crashed yesterday, and we got it back up this morning. But now the BES is doing all sorts of craziness.

A few users can and do send and receive email just fine, they also appear in Blackberry Manager just fine as well.

Everyone one else on the BES can not send or receive email at all.
About 20 of the people that cant send or receive have all of their stats cleared on the BES, and when you open their account properties it shows "<bes_server_name> Intializing..." and No Pin number.
Everyone else shows up fine in Blackberry Manager with all their stats, but when you try to open the user properties, it says "Unable to access mailbox for this user."

We tried this from RIM to try and remedy the "Unable to access.." problem, but it did nothing.
KB02546


Also for some strange reason, when the users connect their devices to their laptops and Desktop Manager, it will show the deivce as connected, but shows the Messaging system "Offline" despite Outlook being open, connected to Exchange, and receiving emails.

Any ideas guys?
We are going to call RIM but only a few individuals can do that for us and they are unreachable at the moment.

Was the BES rebooted?

What exactly happened to your Exchange server? Did you have to restore from a backup of some kind?

Yes BES has been rebooted on several occasions, and services restarted many times.
On the exchange server the mail store appeared to have gotten corrupted, but was repaired. (not restored)

We also cannot add users in from the Global address list. When we search the global address list we can find the users, but wehn we hit OK to add it says the mailbox can not be found, or may have been deleted. This was an account for on of the IT guys here who had already had an account on the BES, we removed that one and tried to re add it to see what happens, thats when we discovered this error too.

Call T-Support; now. This isn't something going to be easily fixed through iterative troubleshooting over the forum.

We are doing that now, just wanted to see if there was some zany setting or utility that might help us out till we got a hold of RIM support. Thanks though.

I think the blackberry information in the mailboxes has been damaged. It would explain why many users are now sitting at initializing.

Could also be a permissions issue too I suppose.

Yes, that's what i'm thinking also. Once the folder in root container of the mailbox gets corrupted, there is no way back. Maybe TSupport could help, but I seriously doubt it, because it got corrupted on Exchange side of the service. i've experienced this before with some users, and only way was to remove the user from BES, delete those folders manually with MFCMAPI (as BES was not able to access and delete the corrupted entry), then readd to the BES (occasionaly restart Dispatcher service before adding).
But maybe he'll get lucky.

We've got a similar issue here, just started within the last 15 hours or so. The majority of users are fine, but most everyone with mailbox agent ID 3 is showing "No PIN". Also at least one reported case of a user with this mailbox agent showing a PIN, but the one in BES is different than the one on their device.

can you correlate all of the users on this agent to a specific mail server / mailbox database?

The users can be correlated to a particular messaging agent, but are on three different exchange servers, one of which is in another state connected via WAN link.

Those that are on the same mail server are distributed mostly evenly across 3storage groups. Unfortunatly RIM has been somewhat vague as to the exact issue, and the root cause "This just happens sometimes" but are suggesting upgrading the servers to 4.1.4 MR3.

Try switching your service account , there is a KB in RIM's KB with that title.
Once that is completed try to re add and reactivate the users.

Was there any problems with the database?

If you perform a reload user on a problem user and then review the magt logs for that user do you see any errors?

Have you had any SQL problems? I've never heard of something like this ... RIM would really be the place to go for this one.

First thing I would do is look at the MAGT logs or the event logs and see what kind of errors (well informational) messages that you are getting. Simplest thing to do first would probably be to switch the service account as your Exchange had problems. Though before that, as someone mentioned, I'd remove a user, run MFCMAPI and delete that BlackBerry folder, re-add the user, try to activate and see what happens.

As far as Desktop Manager stating offline:

- close and re-open Desktop Manager. Does it still happen?
- create a new MAPI profile on the user's desktop for Desktop Manager to use.

I had this problem this past week when our Exchange Server box crashed and we rebuilt it. Everthing was OK until we rebooted our BES server and then nothing worked. Had the "unable to open mailbox, may have been deleted" message when trying to do anything with the user in the console. From researching the problem, I guessed the hidden Blackberry folders for each BES user in the exchange mail store had gotten corrupted. I used a utility from MS called mdbvu32 to access each users' profile and delete the hidden Blackberry folders in the message store within Exchange. It would be very tedious for a large number of users, but is a lot easier than exporting their emails, deleting and recreating their accounts and importing.

The mdbvu32 tool is a little tricky to use. Be careful!
Backup the mail store and also the BESMGMT database on the SQL Server.
Delete the user using the BES console.
Run the mdbvu32 tool on the BES server while logged in with the besadmin account. When you open the tool, you can select a profile, but click new and create a profile for the first user.
Open a new session, open the mailbox store, go to the Root folder. Double-click the Blackberry folder to see the subfolders.
Choose empty folders from the list of functions and click call function.
Close that window to go back to the root.
Select the Blackberry folder and call the delete folder function. Close the mailbox store, close the session and exit.
Use the BES console to add the user again.
Repeat for the next user.

This worked for me - I had the exact same symptoms as the first poster, but please use cautiously. These are rough directions because I am writing this from memory.

Update: I just noticed that post immediately above this appears to offer a similar solution with a different tool. That tool might be easier to use...