I had a “little” trouble a while ago with a Blackberry Express server. For reasons beyond the scope of this post, the user account that was used to start the BES services had to be changed (different username and password). I updated the BES services in Windows with the new account, but I noticed that the webinterface for administration of the server was no longer working.
After a closer look in the event viewer, I noticed that the “Blackberry Administration Service Application Server” service was restarting every couple of minutes (that is to say: it started and shut down after a few seconds, after a few minutes the service kept retrying this without success).
The logon account for that service was correct and had the correct access rights. Furthermore, Windows didn’t give me any warning dialog boxes when I tried to start the service manually, so I had to look somewhere else. Obviously, it had something to do with the changing of the account, so I started my quest for the answer, searching in that direction.
After a lot of suggestions saying I should just reinstall the whole BES with the new account, I came across this article in the Blackberry knowledge base: link. It wasn’t exacly the same problem I had, but it sounded familiar and I had a hunch.
It turns out that during the installation of the BES Express software, it writes a few registry keys to “HKEY_CURRENT_USER”. These keys are required by the “Blackberry Administration Service Application Server” service. The new account for that service, can’t see these registry keys because the are in “HKEY_CURRENT_USER”. Because of that, it cannot start.
The solution is rather simple:
- Login on the server with the old account that was used for the BES services.
- Open regedit on the server
- Take a backupof the registry! This is not required but, you never know…
- Go to the following key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Research In Motion\BlackBerry Enterprise Server
- Right-click on the “BlackBerry Administration Service” key and choose “export” and save this export somewhere that is accessible (Doublecheck that the export range is set to “Selected branch”).
- Log off and log in again with the new account that is used for the BES services.
- Import the registry keys that you exported in step 5 by double clicking on the export file.
After this, the “Blackberry Administration Service Application Server” service should be able to start again and you will be able to browse to the webinterface.
