We've all been there before; you're being held your against your will and forced to unlock your BlackBerry and cough up those juicy stock tips and celebrity phone numbers. If you're on BES 4.0 or newer, fear not, for you can covertly notify the office of your plight and still satisfy your demanding captors.
Right after you make sure your KRE1 policy is up to date, you should have your BES administrator set the Duress Notification Address IT Policy. Once this policy is set the number of password attempts will be reduced by half. With a default policy this means you'll have 5 chances to enter a correct password.
If you truly are under duress you'll want to enter your password with the first character moved to the end of the string. If your normal password is joshua then you'll want to enter oshuaj instead. Entering the modified password will automatically send a message to the address specified in the Duress Notification policy.
When the message is sent no copy will show up in the Sent Items, and the network activity arrows will not be shown. The device will unlock just as if you typed your normal password, and your savior will receive an email in this format:
From: <user> [mailto:<user_name>@<domain_name>.com]
Sent: <Date and Time>
To: <email address from IT policy>
Subject: Unlocked
Name: <BlackBerry Owner Information>
Email: <user's email address>
PIN: <PIN Number>
Time: <Date and Time displayed on the handheld>
If you're using any carrier in the world besides Verizon, and have a GPS enabled device someone can find your last reported location using the BES2. If you are trying to rescue a Verizon Wireless user please call (800) 922-0204, press 0 about 4 times and enjoy the dulcet voice of a CSR explain that GPS is disabled until they figure out a way to monetize it VZNavigator is released3.
BlackBerry Hotkeys
This list is by no means exhaustive, and the keys may vary a bit between devices and OS versions.
Detailed Item Information
This is mostly useful when troubleshooting duplicate emails or reconciliation problems. Open up a message or other PIM (Calendar, Address Book, etc) item and type ALT+VIEW. You'll be shown a RefID (and a a FolderID for messages) which you can search for in the BES logs.
Event Log
From the Home Screen type ALT+LGLG to view the Event Log. You can filter events, copy a day's worth, or work on discovering why all of your email older than today suddenly vanished after net.rim.something crashed.
Help Me!
Basic, but useful; press ALT+SHIFT/CAP+H to bring up a help screen that has your PIN, ESN, IMEI, OS version, Signal Strength, Battery Level, disk usage and for the true geeks, device uptime.
Enterprise Activation
To bring up advanced options for the Enterprise Activation type ALT+CNFG the Enterprise Activation screen. Characters will echo to the input field, just ignore them.
More Shortcuts
Take a look at KB0286, How to use keyboard shortcuts for BlackBerry smartphones with a trackwheel.
- Kidnap/Ransom and Insurance [back]
- The Enterprise Location Tracking policy must be enabled [back]
- VZW may also claim it's for security reasons; they obviously never considered my scenario [back]
March 12th, 2009 at 8:50 am
Hi,
We are making BB applications.I am working with BB 8700. To debug, I typed "Alt LGLG". The problem is I am not able to set filters. I enable some filters (like UI, System, Security App,quick contacts,Location API, Mail API, Key Store Manage,JAVA Exception,Alarm) and disable other filters. On saving, I clear logs and then come back to eventlogger after some time. On going to options, I see some "net.rim. " options selected (although I had disabled them) and most of the options which I had selected are unselected.
This happens irrespective of selecting Warning, Information or Debug as an option for seeing logs.
I am not able to apply the filters for viewing logs as required and hence have to deal with a huge quantity of non useful information to get to small bits of useful ones. This is making testing very difficult.
I googled a lot but could not get any results for this problem. Please advice how to go about it.
Thanks in Advance.
March 12th, 2009 at 11:17 am
I'm actually not sure, I haven't actually used the event logger for any sustained period of time. Usually it's when I want more information about a specific event or issue.
Are you on a BES? What's your IT Policy refresh time? Try setting that to 0 (disable) and see if the filter settings still change. It's a long shot, but it might work. Otherwise my suggestion would be to open up the event logger more frequently, hopefully that will stop the filter from expiring.
March 16th, 2009 at 6:11 am
Hey Corey,
Thanks for your reply. We dont use a BES and IT policies… So could not try that solution. I however, had tried opening the event logger more frequently, but that doesnt help. In fact, I noticed that on saving the desired filters as enabled and rest all as disabled, if I went back to Options again and checked, the settings were not saved and some "net.rim. " options were selected (although I had disabled them) and most of the options which I had selected were unselected. Hence debugging has become very difficult.
Please guide how to go about it….
Thanks in Advance.