[George Burdell]

I am developer working on a product that must play nicely with blackberry. Being a developer, my test-rig is behind a firewall. My current objective is to get the blackberry email system working.

All servers (AD, BES, Exch) and all clients (Mac laptop, Windows Laptop, Blackberry 9650) have unfettered tcp/ip access to one another, and the outside world (the handheld is on a wifi network). The outside world DOES NOT have access to anything. Even the domain names resolve to internal IP addresses.

Nothing works correctly. I managed to get enterprise-activation to "work" by using a bare-metal windows installation in conjunction with the blackberry desktop program.

After restarting the blackberry, all emails fail (send/receive/name-lookup). The BES logs appear to be unaffected.

Any suggestions would be most appreciated.

-George

[penguin3107]

You can't do what you're doing.

BES needs an outbound connection to RIM's NOC on tcp port 3101.

Additionally, you must use real email addresses which are currently functioning properly on your Exchange server. (Email address must be able to accept messages from outside sources.)

Basically, you can't have an Internal-only setup. BES requires the outside world to be involved.

[wunderbar]

Pretty much what Penguin said.

The BES requires a connection to the outside world. There is no way around this.

[knottyrope]

KB03735-Firewall and connection requirements for the BlackBerry Enterprise Server

Also need port 443 to RIM servers once in a while if you want it to get device.xml and vendor.xml update automatically.

[George Burdell]

I appreciate everone's responses, but there seems to be one point of confusion:

All internal servers/clients CAN contact RIM. It is the converse that does not work. I've read over the blackberry doc concerning BES behind a firewall, and it seems to agree with followups that OUTBOUND connections must work. In my case it is only INBOUND connections that fail.

Does the MDS require BES to be capable of accepting INCOMING connections?

thanks, and sorry if I'm just restating the same question -- I'd like to be very clear on this point.

-George

[penguin3107]

BES doesn't require any incoming connections... but Exchange does.
Your Exchange server must be able to receive email.

You also need an Enterprise BlackBerry Data Plan provisioned on the handheld.