Our blackberry service with Us Cellular in Missouri started having
issues about 8am this morning.
Haven't received an e-mail on my Blackberry since around 4AM, located
in Atlanta.
Email on my iPhone is working fine.. 
Found this posting:
The blackberry message service is centralised with a lot of processing intelligence in the core. Messaging services that use the core as a simple transport and shift the processing intelligence to the edge have different, less-dramatic failure modes.
No news, here. http://isen.com/stupid.html
Joe
I've always believed that RIM's decision to implement email and other
services in this way was a very poor choice that at some point would
blow up in their faces. My evil half would say that is was a
marketer's rather than an engineer's decision.
It's one thing when you are basically the only game in town (as RIM
was a few years ago), now it's a completely different scenario.
RIM already faces a complicated playground. More high-profile
incidents like this one and suddenly people start losing confidence in
the service... one thing leads to another... then suddenly you're
target for acquisition by a huge corporation. Then things look up
again but exactly one year later that huge corporation buries
everything you did and you're a page in a history book 
Good luck to them,
Carlos
Joe Abley (jabley) writes:
> Email on my iPhone is working fine..
The blackberry message service is centralised with a lot of processing intelligence in the core. Messaging services that use the core as a simple transport and shift the processing intelligence to the edge have different, less-dramatic failure modes.
This is not the case for corporate customers with dedicated servers,
AFAIU.
P.
I'm no expert, but my understanding is that at some/most/all traffic between handhelds and a BES, carried from the handheld device through a cellular network, still flows through RIM.
Joe
Joe Abley (jabley) writes:
> This is not the case for corporate customers with dedicated servers,
> AFAIU.I'm no expert, but my understanding is that at some/most/all traffic between handhelds and a BES, carried from the handheld device through a cellular network, still flows through RIM.
Correct - they need to transit at some point through the RIM servers.
http://www.interworks.com/blogs/wlyles/2010/01/14/why-rim-outage-affects-users-corporate-bes
That's just wrong on so many levels.
Cheers,
Phil
yet... people AND CORPORATIONS still use them... Hrm, one wonders how
plain-text-like the traffic is between endpoints? how much data is
there that could be used to identify the endpoints? "Look, jabley's
sure sending lots of traffic to capitan knight... maybe there's
something going on in jabley-land?"
just sayin'!
You are correct. The BES uses PSKs to talk to RIM's servers, which then
uses them to talk to the devices over the carrier networks. All of this
was in complete failure mode until sometime overnight when it appears to
have all started flowing again. Someday either Google or Apple will get
off their rear ends and roll out an end to end encrypted service that
plugs into corporate email/calendar/workgroup services and we can all
gladly toss these horrid little devices in the recycle bins where they
belong.
Jamie
From: Joe Abley [mailto:jabley@hopcount.ca]
Sent: Wednesday, October 12, 2011 6:06 PM
To: Phil Regnauld
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Subject: Re: [outages] News item: Blackberry services down worldwide> Joe Abley (jabley) writes:
>>
>>
>>> Email on my iPhone is working fine..
>>
>> The blackberry message service is centralised with a lot of
processing intelligence in the core. Messaging services that use the
core as a simple transport and shift the processing intelligence to
the
edge have different, less-dramatic failure modes.
>
> This is not the case for corporate customers with dedicated
servers,
> AFAIU.I'm no expert, but my understanding is that at some/most/all traffic
between handhelds and a BES, carried from the handheld device through
a
It's called Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync
It works with Android, Apple and Microsoft devices. I believe both Lotus and Groupwise have licensed and support it as well. We have a few (but now, very few) blackberry users remaining. They won't let it go until we rip it out of their hands.
Any idea of when Apple's ActiveSync Implementation will close the gap
with what BES does?
Like maybe having Important message notifications? Categories? Filters?
I use an iPhone, but mail handling on it is lacking.
Agreed. Had a customer during the timeframe of this week ditch 90 blackberries for iPhone/android devices. He actually sent me a video after BES finished uninstalling and he shut the server down "so help me I'm never getting another one of these damn coasters." One user said when they got the phone "where is the silly wheelie clicky thing." IT manager said "oh no you just touch the screen."
I'm told it was like watching an 8 year old with a box of fireworks and matches....
For those who complain about security on windows mobile, iPhone or android... you can do l2tp vpn and then ActiveSync on top of that over https. Mobile device policies in Exchange for user experience control. Overall much easier than Blackberry, not dependent on someone else's equipment for things like mail delivery and internet browsing, and one less server to care about.
Like Blake mentioned, I for one will also be ditching Blackberry devices due to the poor, irregular service which Blackberry users continue to be subject to due to RIM's inability to provide a stable and reliable service. To add further insult to injury, it just simply is unacceptable to be subject to RIM's high service and licensing costs for BES to ultimately rely on a second-rate infrastructure that causes regular 'blackouts'.
Time to more to a standalone device that then relies only on the carriers, which in most cases are just as unreliable. None the less, I for one can't justify paying for an 'enterprise service' to subject to incompetence and instability of the provider. These situations simply arise to often with RIM, yet as a service provider they chose to ignore that impact these outages have on their customers in the corporate arena. Real-time communications in the corporate/enterprise world have no become one of the primary methods of communication, due to the technology RIM et al offer.
It is indeed a shame that the likes of Apple iOS & Google Android are yet to provide features that compete with BlackBerrys, such as encryption etc. (I am not particular clued up with regards to Windows Mobile however...) All of which, to date, are features which are leveraged in terms of justifying the cost of implementing a Blackberry solution.
Furthermore, I found RIM's somewhat patronising updates from RIM's CIOs and CEOs quite insulting, particularly when an official statement had already been released stating the issues were 'resolved' to later contradict this statement and simple refer to it as some kind of 'mistake'.
Unacceptable, as I am sure many of you would agree.
Regards,
P.
<plug>I'm fairly sure K-9 does GPG, at least for the email</plug>
Cheers,
-- jr 'just a doco writer' a
plus normal mail + k9 will do TLS on SMTP and IMAP... or they both do
with my mail server just fine. (idevices seeem to also do this well
enough)
It's possible that the 'encryption' comment from Jamie is really about
encrypting the actual device... which I believe Android[0] will do, I
don't know if idevices do though.
-chris
0: <http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2011/04/putting-android-to-work-for-your.html>
As of 2.3[.x?] (can't remember if it's a sub release that intro'd this),
Android devices can be wholly encrypted, though I don't know if they are
by default. All these kludges are great on a small scale, but the BES
does end to end encryption for transmission, plugs into Exchange, Lotus,
Sametime, proxies internal http[s], and lets us manage policies and push
out software updates from a central management point. When it works,
it's also scalable, which matters when you have thousands of devices to
manage.
Jamie
I think the big problem is that rev1 of iDevice did not include on-device crypto, and there was a case where they also 'lied' about their crypto capability to the servers.
Rebuilding this trust can take some time. I do expect that with the iMessage stuff that was released yesterday (SMS/MMSoIP to email/phone#) many more companies will shift to using that instead as the value of BBM is decreased.
I also wonder what the impact of iMessage and others will be on places like hotel networks as the devices camp out longer/more often on the wifi, etc. We observed the impact to a hotel of the NANOG crowd this week (i wonder if there will be lessons learned on the part of lodgenet, etc?)
I know personally I've observed the attwifi ssid expanding to more places (including hilton branded properties) in the past 6 months to offload cellular data.
- Jared
Pierce,
Actually with Windows Mobile and Exchange Enterprise, you can force handheld encryption