#BESMigration for Exchange from BES 4.1 to BES 5 #Blackberry

Hello all

I have recently had to perform a migration for one of our customers from Blackberry Enterprise Server 4.1 (4.1.7.17) for Exchange with integrated MSDE to Blackberry Enterprise Server 5 (5.0.3.31) for Exchange with a dedicated SQL 2005 Server. Thankfully RIM produced a handy tool called the BES Enterprise Transporter which is part of the Resource Kit.

First of all make sure you have completed all of the perquisites for the BES 5 installation, theses consists of the following at time of writing (for an official guide please click here):

Configure Windows permissions for the Blackberry Service Account

  • Add user to local administrators group on the BES 5 Server (Computer Management);
  • Enable log on locally (Local Security Policy);
  • Enable log on as a service (Local Security Policy);
  • The Blackberry Service Account already had the Send As / Receive As permission assigned to it on the domain level;

Configure SQL Server:

  • Logon to the SQL Server and create a new database for the BES Configuration (I called mine BESMgmt);
  • Assign the Blackberry Service Account the following server roles, Server Administrators and Database Creators, then assign the account with the db_owner database role.

When performing the BES 5 installation, I installed it under the Blackberry Service Account and followed the on screen instructions. I then completed the basic settings such as licensing, IT Policy, etc.

Blackberry Enterprise Transporter Tool

We then want to start the fun part where we migrate users from one server to another. You can download and install the BES Enterprise Transporter tool from here. Open the Transporter Tool and complete the following steps:

  • Create a user manifest file, this is an XML file which stores the information about the source / destination Blackberry domain;
  • Setup the two database connections, these settings will be cache for future;
  • Click details, and then click find users. You will then be able to search and select the users you wish to migrate, I recommend performing this on a test account if you have the ability to do so first. Select the destination IT Policy you wish to apply to the user and click done. You can the preview the task which will display the expected results, if this completes successfully you can continue to migrate the user by clicking migrate.

The migration of a user took a couple of minutes, however this may vary depending on your environment. The great thing about this process is that it’s completely transparent and the user doesn’t lose any emails as redirection is disabled on the original BES until the new BES is ready to take over.

Thanks for reading, I hope you found this useful.

2x ThinClient Error Code: TCAC008

Hello all, we work with a number of customers who use the 2x ThinClient software. It enables PXE booting of machines into a ThinClient which then connects to a Terminal Services or Citrix environment. The server has been working perfectly well without any problems for the past six – seven months, but today we recieved the following error:

2x Thin Client Error TCAC008

2x ThinClientOS Error

Could not register a ThinClient session on the server. (TCAC008)

The 2x website doesn’t have an article which relates to this, so I thought I’d share it here. For some reason the 2x ThinClient Server had lost its licensing information, so we quickly re-entered it and restarted our ThinClients and they booted up correctly. (Hurray!)

Cisco Router Static DHCP Bindings

When using a Cisco router to serve DHCP Requests, it’s not immediately obvious how-to create reservations for a DHCP Pool. If the device has already picked up an IP Address via DHCP you will need to first remove the DHCP Binding by running the follow command:

clear ip dhcp binding 192.168.0.x (IP Address of the device)

This is the configuration which I have used on a Cisco 1841 Router:

ip dhcp pool name-pool
import all
network 192.168.0.0 255.255.255.0
default-router 192.168.0.254
dns-server 192.168.0.1 192.168.0.2
lease 0 2
!
ip dhcp pool name-pool-static
host 192.168.0.253 255.255.255.0
client-identifier 0100.xxxx.xxxx.xx (MAC Address of the device)

To verify this, use the follow command from exec mode:

Router# show ip dhcp binding
Bindings from all pools not associated with VRF:
IP address Client-ID/ Hardware address/ User name   Lease expiration    Type
192.168.113.249 0100.xxxx.xxxx.xx                   Infinite            Manual