iPhone OS4 and EAS issues

I do remember my first “real” tech job way-back-when.  Exchange 5.5 was cutting edge technology, which is dating me for sure. We had a graphics consultant come into the company for a couple of months to help re-design our website, and that required that this employee have an email address and account with our firm.  Getting them an account was no issue, as Mac systems could easily talk to an Exchange 5.5 server at that point, but once we connected the Mac to the network, it immediately took over the Exchange system. 

I don’t mean that it was easier to control Exchange via the Mac, I mean IT TOOK OVER THE @!#(%$ SERVER!

No one could get email, no one could send us email, nothing worked at all unless you were on the Mac itself.  Finally, after bringing in a Mac expert for a few hours and a ton of troubleshooting with Microsoft, we found the issue. It was a rare hiccup in the Mac networking that caused Exchange to essentially ignore anything else, and we fixed it with no future problems.

Recently, I heard of the same issue happening again, but not rare, and on the iPhone.  After the complete metal breakdown brought on by the thought of the nightmare recurring, I did some investigative work for you, my readers – and for the sake of my sanity.

As reported in Exchangepedia, the issue revolves around a bug in the iPhone OS4 software that hurls a wrench into the Client Access Services (CAS) systems of Exchange 2007 and 2010.  This isn’t an Apple-specific issue, as you could see the same problem on Google devices, but it does appear that it happens much more often with iPhone systems running OS4.  What happens is that the iPhone makes a series of requests to Exchange to perform ActiveSync.  The problem is that there is a relatively short timeout on these operations (30 seconds) and if the CAS system is busy, the iPhone will send the requests again.  And again.  And again… Eventually, the flood of requests becomes a contributing factor in the delay of the response, creating a never-ending loop.  The only way to stop it is to either stop the iPhone or the CAS system and start over, but eventually it will happen again. 

The good news is that there are ways to increase the timeout, and therefore reduce the incidence of this happening in your corporate environment.  The link above has information on how to obtain a profile update that fixes the problem in most cases.

I guess everything old *is* new again.