The stupidity of Edimax and static IP addresses….

 

Which is an unfortunate title for a business which produces some very good value network devices which we come across in a number of situations, but we recently needed a couple of budget IP cameras for an installation in a nightclub environment

We got a pair of Edimax IC-3030PoE units with a matching PoE switch so the cameras could be mounted to ceilings where there was no power provision but a cat5 cable could be run.

We wanted to test these before sending to site so happily set one up in our office. Very quickly after the camera was plugged into the LAN we started to get internet connectivity issues and then complete outage for LAN users. After a lot of back and forth and eventually plugging camera in alone to the switch it appears that the camera comes default with a static IP address – which in our case is the same IP as our main domain controller and DNS server in our LAN. We thought this was very odd so tested the other unit and got the same result so its by design rather than some accident

Why does a manufacturer give a non-primary IP device a static IP address? For a router, modem or similar it makes sense as this would typically be the first device in the LAN, but for a general IP device which pretty much all users would expect to plug into an existing network and then find it I don't see any reason why it should have a static IP – it frankly seems stupid

 

Otherwise the devices are very good value for money, work well and have a good range of features once you get past the nasty ActiveX plugin for Internet explorer which insists on crashing regularly – works well in Firefox though…

How to break Blackberry Enterprise Activation with Outlook…

 

We had a problem recently with getting a new Blackberry device activated for a customer who was on the Microsoft BPOS platform and using their hosted Blackberry Enterprise Server service. Up until this point we had had very few problems with this combination. We setup a new mailbox and activated a blackberry device for the personal assistant of the main partner at the business. All good, everything working as expected, no problems.

We added the blackberry service to the Partner's BPOS account, set the activation password and talked the user through activating their blackberry….

 

Nothing. Activation failed

 

Worked through the usual, checking for user error typing in password, checking their mailbox for the blackberry activation messages, checking the network, wiping the blackberry, retrying activation. Nothing.

We removed the user from the blackberry portal in BPOS, added them back. Still no activation.

We used a number of test & spare blackberry devices – none of these would activate

Both the PA and the Partner also had iPhones setup against their BPOS Exchange accounts. We removed these devices. Wiped the blackberry and re-tried activation. Nothing.

We raised this to the BPOS tech support guys. A number of rounds later, no success. Customer understandably starting to get a little flustered as were we. This highlighted one of the down sides to hosted blackberry and exchange services in that when a problem arises on a Blackberry Server we have admin access to we are able to get pretty low-down right away with access to all the logs and inner workings – with the BPOS platform we had none of this and had to wait for issue/response/reply/response and so on.

Eventually the problem was raised to RIM tech support by the guys at BPOS  - again re-enforcing this down side – we would have raised this issue a lot sooner if it was our server

The solution was not immediate and took a couple of rounds of back and forth with the RIM chaps to finally track this down to a rule in Outlook which the Partner had setup which we didn't know about – in hindsight we should have looked through the Outlook rules.

The rule forwarded a copy of every email to his PA. ‘Obviously’ (we think it is now…) this was also forwarding the special activation email with the ETP.DAT attachment to the PA which is required to close the activation loop between device, blackberry infrastructure and email account. The PA’s device was already activated and on the same domain, on the same exchange server and also on the same BES server – it appears that the PAs device was effectively replying to the BES infrastructure that it was already activated – end of the activation at the BES server end. The Partner’s device would not activate.

 

We temporarily disabled the Outlook rule, activated the device, re-enabled the Outlook rule and everything working as expected…