Forgotten your BES administration password? How to reset your BES password

thank to: http://mohamedridha.com/

The Blackberrry Administration service (BAS) console plays an integral part of blackberry management in all companies that have implemented BES. The most common usage that one would require BAS is to activate blackberry handsets for users, this then enables users to access company mail, contacts and calenders through their blackberry devices.

What happens when the environment only has one administrator account and the password has been lost? Is it a dead end situation? Well it may seem so however there is light at the end of the tunnel and all it requires is basic understanding of SQL database and how BAS uses SQL.  The way that SQL stores information is in tables and each table relates to a specific aspect of the particular application in question, in this case BAS. In order to access and see the tables you will need to have SQL Server Management Studio installed this will enable one to view the tables, their properties and contents.

Reseting BAS admin password using SQL Management Studio

1) Open SQL Server Management Studio – In this example the server is windows 2003 using the express version

2) Expand Databases> BESMgmt> Tables – This is where all the tables are stored and one will notice that each table has a specified role knowledge of these tables is not required

3) Locate dbo.BASUsers table – this is the table that is of importance here it contains information about all the users that access BAS in the screenshot below the attributes of the table is shown and the column ‘LoginPassword’ is highlighted. This is the column that will be modified to perform password reset.

4) Open table by right clicking table and click ‘Open table’ then locate the BAS admin account and the ‘LoginPassword’ column. The column highlighed below shows the admin BAS account  the highlighted numbers is a random hash that is used to protect the password from view. In order to change the password modifity this field with the has code ‘431d615b2de61fb1‘  This will reset the password to ‘berry‘

5) Open BAS in browser and login with administrator account using the password ‘berry’ you can now change your admin password by searching for the admin account under Manager users and then modifying the user to change the password, once this is done then click save all.

Alternative using SQL Script.

If one is comfortable with excuting SQL scripts then the script below will reset the admin password to blackberry.  

DECLARE
    @DisplayName              VARCHAR(256),
    @Authentication           VARCHAR(256),
    @AuthenticatorTypeId      INT,
    @AuthenticatorInstanceId  INT,
    @ExternalAuthenticatorId  VARCHAR(255),
    @EncryptedPassword        VARCHAR(256)
      
/************************************************************
Start of editing required section
*************************************************************/

SET @DisplayName =         ‘System Administrator’            – Display name (Not always used)
SET @Authentication =         ‘BAS’                    – ‘BAS’ for BAS authentication
SET @EncryptedPassword =    ’2951a982f568f15567b7c6e0e50990b9′     – Encrypted string of password ‘blackberry’

/************************************************************
End of editing required section
*************************************************************/

IF @Authentication LIKE ‘BAS’
BEGIN
    SET @AuthenticatorTypeId =    0                – Set to 0 for BAS
    SET @AuthenticatorInstanceId =     0                – Set to 0 for BAS
    SET @ExternalAuthenticatorId = NULL
  
    EXEC SetUpBASorADAuthentication @DisplayName, @AuthenticatorTypeId, @AuthenticatorInstanceId, @ExternalAuthenticatorId, @EncryptedPassword
  
END
GO

Special thanks to the thread below which this article is based upon.
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