After trying various fixes, including deploying the BB DST update to the handheld, I found that the “Canberra, Sydney +10″ time zone was creating the appointments as +11. If I set the users handset to “Hobart +10″ the appointment times worked perfectly. After finally giving up and calling Telstra I was put on hold… when a recorded message said there was dedicated BB support on the Telstra website I decided to check it out.

I found that there was indeed an issue with the DST zones and it would affect all BES users from 1st March to 4th April.

Let me save all of you Telstra customers 16 hours of work searching for this update: http://www.blackberry.com/btsc/dynamickc.do?externalId=KB15058&sliceId=SAL_Public&command=show&forward=nonthreadedKC&kcId=KB15058 (and for god sake RIM, why can’t you make it easier to find technical information on your website? Oh, and open your knowledge-base to Google! Grrr)

In the end, follow the steps in the URL above (its a simple reg fix, and a SQL script) and your “Canberra, Sydney +10″ will be working fine again.

Phew.

After restarting the RAS services I started to troubleshoot.

I tried everything from disabling/enabling the Miniport driver to deleting the PPTP config and starting again – all to no avail.

Running the Microsoft Port Query tool (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;310099) I found that the PPTP port 1723 was “ESTABLISHED” – this should be in “LISTENING” mode. This tells me that there is something running on the 1723 port that shouldn’t be – locking my users out.

I then used another great tool from sysinternals to find the process that was using my PPTP port. The tool is called TCPView and you can download it at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897437.aspx. TCPView told me that the connection on port 1723 was established by my SQL server and the exe that was using it was a BlackBerry service. I killed the process, restarted the RAS services and our PPTP VPN was now working.