MDS requirements and limitations  |
It is important to understand the following MDS requirements and limitations. |
It is important to understand the following MDS requirements and limitations.
- All BlackBerry® smartphone users within a company are deployed either with or without MDS. There is no offering that supports a mixture of some users with MDS and some without. Your decision whether to use MDS should be made carefully. After the company BlackBerry subscription is active, you cannot switch from an MDS configuration to a non-MDS configuration, or vice versa.
- A BlackBerry smartphone subscription that supports MDS has a 300-seat minimum requirement.
- A Juniper SRX240 Services Gateway device is required to establish a virtual private network (VPN) for MDS. No other gateway device is currently supported. Network connections from the service to on-premises servers go through the VPN. To configure the Juniper device requires a computer with a serial port.
- If your company has an MDS subscription, the VPN configuration is required for non-MDS functionality, such as access to mail and personal information management features, as well as for web access provided by the MDS functionality. No user can access the service through a BlackBerry smartphone until VPN configuration is complete.
- You must obtain the following information from an IBM® Customer Service Representative before configuring the VPN: a VPN authentication key, a BlackBerry Enterprise Server IP address, a service gateway IP address, and a secure tunnel IP address. In addition, you must provide to the Customer Service Representative a customer gateway IP address to use to connect to your Juniper device. For additional information, see "Preparing to configure the VPN."
- A proxy server is required. All MDS traffic, which in most cases includes BlackBerry smartphone access to external sites, is directed to the customer proxy server through the Juniper SRX240 Services Gateway. The proxy server forwards network traffic from the service to the appropriate target servers, including external servers on the Internet. The customer uses the proxy server to control access to the target servers.
- If the proxy server goes down, MDS traffic does not flow and BlackBerry smartphone users are unable to make MDS connections. Some BlackBerry smartphones allow general mobile web browsing without MDS. Check with your Research In Motion® service representative for details.
- The service sends traffic to the proxy server only over port 80 (HTTP) or port 443 (HTTPS). To discuss the possibility of opening additional ports, if needed, contact your IBM Customer Service Representative.
- Web sites that are accessed through MDS over port 443 (HTTPS) require certificates from a trusted certificate authority such as VeriSign. BlackBerry smartphone users cannot use MDS over port 443 to access sites with untrusted or self-signed certificates.
- You must configure your firewall to allow connections over UDP ports 500, 4500, and 10000 between service_gateway_ip and the customer_gateway_ip. Protocol 50 (esp) needs to be enabled on your firewall. If there is a firewall between your Juniper device and your proxy server, you must enable ports 80 and 443 on the proxy server. For additional information, see "Preparing to configure the VPN."
Parent topic: BlackBerry smartphone support for Mobile Data System (MDS)
Related tasks
Configuring Mobile Data System (MDS)
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| Version 2 |
March 1, 2012 |
2:45:24 PM |
by Kendra Bowker  |
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