After a recent reboot I found that my BES Express server was no longer communicating with devices.

My first dilemma was the Blackberry Controller Service wouldn’t start.  I got this in my controller log file:

[20000] (05/16 01:22:56.500):{0x147C} LogReceiver: Failed to bind a socket

That told me that there was a conflict with whatever port the controller was trying to grab.  After a little Googling I found that adding port 4070-4071 to the ReservedPorts TCP/IP registry key would fix this.  The Microsoft DNS service fights with BES for control of ephemeral ports which is a known situation.  Rebooted the computer and found that my devices were updating and the controller service started successfully.  However, my Application Server service kept shutting down every time I would attempt to access it, and could not enter the web administration interface.  I would ultimately get a connection timed out message.  I observed this in my system log:

Error: The BlackBerry Administration Service – Application Server service terminated unexpectedly.
It has done this 1 time(s).  The following corrective action will be taken in 60000 milliseconds: Restart the service.

And this in my BBAS logs:

(05/17 19:34:43:369):{main} [org.jboss.system.ServiceController] [WARN] Problem starting service jboss.cache:service=BASObjectVersioningCache
org.jgroups.ChannelException: failed to start protocol stack

I eventually found the fix here at the Blackberry support forums, which is to add an additional range of reserved ports for the Application Service:

Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
Locate and then click the following subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters
Right-click ReservedPorts, and then click Modify.
Paste the following at the bottom.
48855-48858
45588-45588
49955-49955
45599-45599

Restart the server.

Once you go to the web admin, you will think its not going to work but hang tight, give it a few seconds and you will be surprised!!

Here’s what my ReservedPorts looks like after my two fixes (ignore the first three lines which were already there in my environment):

I don’t know how this person picked these ports (maybe spoke with support?)… but it DID indeed fix the problem for me.

My environment: Windows 2003 Server / Domain Controller / Exchange Server 2003 Standard