Blackberry Controller Service Not Starting and Event 5003

OK I'm not a fan of the Blackberry and SBS. It works but I really hate the additional setup on the SBS server. However we do it because we aim to keep our customers happy. Some services such as TMobile just don't have great Windows devices as of yet.

However we've had more issues with the Blackberry Enterprise Server software in the last week than we've had the entire time I've been running this place.

The Blackberry Controller service would not start up and we would get an event 5003 that was populated in the event log. After some digging I found the issue.

The root cause is the Microsoft Patch MS08-37 that affects DNS ports.

Going here http://www.blackberry.com/btsc/articles/787/KB16001_f.SAL_Public.html I quickly found out it was the DNS server causing the issue.

So I stopped the DNS server service and then started the Blackberry controller service. Voila, working like a champ. However that won't help the next reboot.

Well the SBS Blog folks are my heroes. This contribution alone to the community is worth every ounch of effort that those folks put into it to keep us informed. By going here: http://blogs.technet.com/sbs/archive/2008/07/17/some-services-may-fail-to-start-or-may-not-work-properly-after-installing-ms08-037-951746-and-951748.aspx you see that you can reserve the DNS ports not to check.

Follow that post and add ports 4070-4071 to the mix. Now reboot. OK all set!

Stinking blackberry or as a client called them this week suckberry.