[Korbyn]

Is anyone else having issues with the Microsoft October security patches? Since being applied on our BES and Exchange boxes, emails only come down in batches, basically when the BES does a rescan about every 20 mintues. New emails are delayed between 2 minutes and 20 minutes from being delivered to our devices (which are Rogers, Bell and Telus).

A buddy on another seperate BES and Exchange environment has noticed the same thing now too.

We're running 4.0.2 (Guess I need to get onto SP3 sooner then later as well)

[Korbyn]

I've found an incompatibility with BES 4.0 SP2 and the Oct security patch MS05-051. With it installed, email messages delivered to the users mailbox wasn't being delivered to the BB in a timely fashion. It would take anywhere from 2 to 25 minutes for delivery of the message. Some how because of the MS05-051 MSDTC/COM+ patch, the new mail notifications from the Exchange servers were not reaching the BES agents. New messages were eventually being picked up when the BES server does a rescan approximately every 20-30 minutes.

If you have applied this hotfix and are having problems, one of the symptoms is that new messages to the users mailbox are coming down in batches. All the new messages received by a user in a 20-30 minute period are delivered all at once. Additionally, you can search the MAGT log files in your BES logs folders for: Queuing new mail through notification There should hundreds if not thousands of these in each days log, if you are seeing very very few, you should probably remove the patch in order to restore BES functionality.

RIM is now aware of this issue and have confirmed it, how much testing they do I have no idea. So far it's BES 4.0 SP2 that has this problem with MS05-051.

[Korbyn]

SP3 has also been confirmed as having the issue with MS05-051.

[LAW]

Does anyone have more information on this or even a link to a relevant RIM KB article?

We are now in limbo on SP3 (which is getting applied in lieu of SP2) until there's more information.

Thanks in advance.

[Korbyn]

I've left the hotfix off of my server, and we applied SP3 this past weekend. The BES appears to be working great, just no longer able to get SMTP notifications for some reason. Every SP seems to wipe out the SMTP notificaiton settings, and this time they don't seem to be working for me.

As far as I know they haven't created an article yet, just that they've confirmed the issue with SP2 and SP3 for 4.0. I don't know if they've even tested against 4.0 with or without SP1, or even any of the older versions.

[jibi]

Korbyn, have you attempted contacting RIM to report the issue? It might help others if an official KB article was posted by RIM on their site. Until RIM is notified and can duplicate the issue, its simply your opinion and observation that there's an incompatibility.

[Korbyn]

As per my second note, RIM is aware and has confirmed the issue, at least the techie I talked to easily replicated it. Plus RIM is the one who confirmed SP3 for me.

Don't expect the great and mighty RIM to turn around a produce an article in a couple of hours, you'll probably be lucky to see it in a week or two. Which is why I use forums like this to spread the word. Take it with a grain of salt as always, but so far people all the people I've talked to who have applied the patch have this problem, which is why I've asked the question at the begining if anyone else is seeing the issue. If you've applied the security patch on your system and didn't have an issue, would like to hear it too, I'll feed it back to rim.

Feel free to test it yourself, you now have some knowlegde of what to look for after you come back online for a potential issue you might have. RIM hasn't gotten back to me as to why it breaks, just that they can replicate it on the two machines they've tested against so far, SP2 and SP3.

[jibi]

ahh, apologies. didn't read that last sentence.

[Korbyn]

I did find someone who had applied the security patch to their 4.0 SP2 server, however they are not running Windows 2003 SP1 yet, and they haven't experienced the issue.

[LAW]

We are now running BES 4.0.3 (SP3) on Windows 2000 with MS Exhchange 2000 and SQL 2000 (all separate servers, all patched with MS05-051), and have not experienced the issue in our test environments.

Will update here as we move forward to production, but it looks like we may squeak by without seeing this particular problem.

[LAW]

Just an update here from the patchmanagement.org mailing list in response to an alert I posted on this topic. One user responded with the following:

Hello,

We encountered this problem on our BES 4.0 server about a month ago. I'm not sure if it was due to the patch, but we ran a handheld cleanup and this fixed our problem.

Steps:
1. Stop all BES services
2. From the cmd prompt under this folder: \Program Files\Research In Motion\BlackBerry Enterprise Server\Utility "handheldcleanup.exe -u"
3. You will need to select the BES mail profile 4. Type in the BES server name, not machine name e.g. berry-bes1 5. Reboot

Please note that I have NOT tested these steps and don't necessarily recommend you try this. Just passing along the post.