Thursday, July 19, 2007

Motorola Q 0x85010014 Code: The Longer Road


All of a sudden, my Motorola Q stopped synch'ing with Exchange. No e-mail; nothing getting updated; zilch: I now owned a square cell phone.

Pinged IT to see what gives and got the message back "nothing changed on our end". Bugger. Which led me to mistake #1: I believed them.

Tried a bunch of different things but each time I tried to synch I got the 0x85010014 error code back. Hmm, over to Google it is, then. Seems that this is a general error code from Exchange and remedies are unpleasantly complex (e.g. reconfigure how you have Exchange set-up for remote SSL access). Well since IT said there's been no changes, I thought to myself, I'll just clean off the Q and start afresh to remove any risk that something had got corrupted locally. Which brings me to mistake #2.

These devices, I have now learned, require certificates to be installed on them in order to authorise access to Exchange. Fair 'nuff. But resetting the thing also deleted whatever certificate IT had added rather than just restoring the basic user settings. To further complicate matters, somehow amnesia set in with the IT group that a) this was required and b) how one was supposed to do it.

Back to Google, and again ran through a range of solutions offered but hard to find something specific. But then, a breakthrough! IT changed their mind - a patch had been added to Exchange and broken ActiveSync. Thanks, boys. So I could have just waited and the problem would have gone away? Great.

Tried again (without required certificate) and at least got a different code this time - 0x80072F0D, for those of you keeping score - which made searching for a solution easier. Tried a *bunch* of them, but only this worked (SSLserverchain). Got the root certificate via using my laptop to open an SSL connection to the remote Outlook client, and that piece of code was then able to figure out the correct certificate(s) and cache them for copying over to the Q.

Loaded the root certificate it found, and bingo, things were back and running.

Hope this saves at least one poor soul out there from losing the same amount of time I wasted. This all took a week from beginning to end, and quite frankly the "Hello? Verizon service? I had a problem with my Q - a hammer fell on it", line was looking pretty attractive there for a while ...

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