Blackberry Controller Service Won’t Restart

 

So, today at work I finally came across this beast.  I had actually heard of the issue before, but had never actually come face-to-face with it and stared it in the eye. Error 5003…..

The Blackberry Controller Service, the service that is supposed to monitor and restart other failed Blackberry services, wouldn’t start no matter how many  times I tried to manually start it.  Useful, isn’t it.

Fortunately, the fix is extremely simple.  Simply go to your DNS Server service and stop it. Go to your Blackberry Controller Service and restart it and then head back to DNS and restart it. Voila….all better.

But, here’s the kicker. This issue is actually caused by a MS Patch and will resurface on every reboot. Apparently DNS will block some ports that the controller needs to function and these will always be closed upon the service restarting, so port reservations actually have to be made in the DNS Server service to prevent this.

This can be done by referencing

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

Simply add ports 4070 and 4071 to the reserved list and your problem is gone forever.

Now if only we could get RIM to take responsibility for its crappy coding to begin with start making software that just worked instead of the buggy amateurish shit that they force upon us now.

That’s my rant and fix for the day!

Cheers!