Cannot login to BES Express 5

I recently installed a new BES Express 5 server at a client site as their old BES 4.1 environment was becoming a bit unreliable. Thought everything installed perfectly and no error messages appeared, whenever I tried to login as either besadmin or the domain administrator, it said that "The username, password, or domain is not correct. Please correct the entry."



I was 100% sure all the details were correct and oddly after a few attempts just to make sure, the besadmin account became locked. This meant that it was passing the details through to AD at least so I knew it wasn't broken in that aspect. I had looked through a few forums and noted that some people suggested adding Kerberos authentication to the besadmin account and this will do the trick. I have installed a few BES environments and never had to do this, so I decided to skip that step. I did notice that both passwords contained a £ or #, which are unsupported characters. I changed the besadmin password to not contain the £ and changed the password for each of the services that used the besadmin account on the new BES server. I also entered in the new password into Blackberry Server Configuration> Administrator Service - AD Settings tab and then restarted the server.

Once this rebooted and all the services started up OK, I could happily login and begin to move users across using the Blackberry Transporter Tool.

For more information on unsupported characters in Blackberry service passwords and how to troubleshoot authentication issues please see Blackberry KB19200 and then go to the local for a nice ale and save yourself 1p ;)