[outages] News item: Blackberry services down worldwide

Thu Oct 13 13:07:54 UTC 2011

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.

-----Original Message-----
From: Matthew Huff [mailto:mhuff at ox.com] 
Sent: Thursday, October 13, 2011 6:44 AM
To: 'Jamie Bowden'; 'Joe Abley'
Cc: 'nanog at nanog.org'
Subject: RE: [outages] News item: Blackberry services down worldwide

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.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jamie Bowden [mailto:jamie at photon.com]
> Sent: Thursday, October 13, 2011 7:36 AM
> To: Joe Abley
> Cc: nanog at nanog.org
> Subject: RE: [outages] News item: Blackberry services down worldwide
> 
> 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
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Joe Abley [mailto:jabley at hopcount.ca]
> > Sent: Wednesday, October 12, 2011 6:06 PM
> > To: Phil Regnauld
> > Cc: nanog at nanog.org
> > Subject: Re: [outages] News item: Blackberry services down worldwide
> >
> >
> > On 2011-10-12, at 18:02, Phil Regnauld wrote:
> >
> > > Joe Abley (jabley) writes:
> > >>
> > >> On 2011-10-12, at 13:05, Leigh Porter wrote:
> > >>
> > >>> 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
> > cellular network, still flows through RIM.
> >
> >
> > Joe