Dedicated Attachment Service Gotcha

Early on we decided to separate our attachment service onto it's own dedicated server in order to offload that work from the BES servers. So now all 3 production BES servers point to this one attachment server.

One thing I noticed early on is that the BES servers cannot re-attach to the attachment server automatically. That is, if you restart the attachment server/service, attachment decoding will fail for all BlackBerry users until the associated BES task is restarted on all the associated BES servers.

The connection to the remote attachment server is handled within the BES Domino task, and the first time it connects upon startup, the BES task creates a special ID associated with that server's connection. When the attachment server is restarted, that connection ID no longer exists and the attachment server will reject decode requests from the BES server.

It is a simple fix (restarting BES task), but disruptive and can cause headaches during our monthly maintenance window - I have to always remember to restart the attachment server first before any of the BES servers are restarted.

This issue occurred in the 4.0 environment however it would be interesting to see if it still occurs in the 4.1 environment. When I find out I will post an update, however I haven't seen any SDR's addressing this issue as of yet.

One more thing to watch out for in a complex distributed BES environment!

UPDATE 7/24/07: It appears that this issue was addressed in 4.1 SP4, so no more reboot juggling required!