1000 iPads continued: Getting started

This is approximately seven hundred of the iPads involved in the thousand iPad project.  Each pallet contains twenty-seven boxes and each box contains ten iPads.  Before anyone tackles a mountain like this there are certain issues to keep  in mind.  The first issue: How are you going to manage all of these pieces of equipment?

This is a serious consideration.  Our first thought was to put this in the library system and check them out like books.  So time to dive into the library catalog system and find the best approach.  Fire up one of the computers and "Houston, we have a problem!"  The library server is offline.  Not just offline, but no amount of resuscitation is going to bring it back online.  Not only that, but the software has not been updated since installation and is five versions old.  

Next option? Time for some research.  Eventually we do find that our library catalog will be perfect if we add one component to it.  The bad part is that the sales department with the software company seems to think we want much more than we need and try to sell us a "bundle."  I don't know about you, but I don't see the point in paying more to save a few dollars in one area by doubling our overall expense.  Then to top everything off we discover that they won't give us full access until we have attended numerous multi-hour web conferences.

We finally get that squared away and are ready to start setting up the servers.  We get one out and setup, have it create all the certificates necessary for managing the profiles and using the mobile device manager and start setting up iPads.  Another problem arises.  The iPads keep timing out during the setup and auto-enrollment in the profile.

Come to find out, there are a few ports that need to be open on the firewall before any of this will work properly.  We discovered that the following ports need be open or else your just spinning your wheels.

2195 TCP Apple Push Notification Service (APNS)
2196 TCP Apple Push Notification Service (APNS)
80 TCP Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
443 TCP Secure Sockets Layer (SSL, or "HTTPS")
1640 TCP Certificate Enrollment Server

If you don't open these ports you get the following reaction on your server's profile manager:

This felt much like the "blue screen of death."  Learn from my mistakes.  If it will save someone some headaches then maybe my suffering is worth it.