Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Ongoing BlackBerry Code Signing Servers Issues & Outage

 Outage

In a really painful move for most third party developers RIM’s code signing servers have been down and having issues since the weekend started. RIM is the only company I know of that requires developers to “phone home” to RIM’s infrastructure to code sign applications and the whole process is already cumbersome. I have been begging my contacts at RIM for years to get rid of the undo burden this complex code signing process adds to BlackBerry developers but it has fallen on deaf ears and instead they have been trying to improve it ever so slowly.

Josep pointed out to me that the code signing servers were down earlier in the week but that is not unusual. What is unusual is how long they have been down for and are still currently in a “degraded state 3-10 emails every single time they code sign an application but they have failed to notify devs about when this outage will be fixed or even its status. This is stopping devs from releasing or testing their third party apps until the code signing servers are back up.

Josep also pointed out this website that tracks the success and downtime of all 4 of the signing servers:
isthesigningserverdown.com/beta/

We shouldn’t need such a website. Hopefully somebody at RIM is noticing and realizes that code signing should only be required for the more complex Certicom cryptographic APIs. They offer mickey mouse security and RIM can simply allow remote killing of rogue apps using another process like BIS. While this is not a big deal in the long run I simply hate code signing…

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