This article describes the issue of a user being unable to locate a device MSG. The user needs to delete it or have the password changed.
A user is unable to locate a device MSG. The user needs to delete it or have the password changed.
The best two pieces of information to search for in these instances are the registered username and/or the phone number (that is the MSISD). However, there are extenuating circumstances, in which this information will not help you locate the phone. At times, companies have devices that get passed around a lot; so the device may still be registered to an earlier user, of whom the admin team was not informed, which renders a username search on the MSG invalid. Customers also swap SIM cards around, so the device may have a different phone number than the admin team realizes. Remember, there can be 1000s of devices in a company and the admin team may not have tracked all the changes properly.
In these cases, the best information to get from the customer is the IMSI, IMEI, and DID of the required device. This can get tricky as different phones allow only certain information to be pulled and sent to the MSG by the Junos Pulse Mobile client. For example, BlackBerry’s only sends a DID; so if you are trying to locate a BlackBerry device, getting the IMSI or IMEI from a customer will not help you to locate the BlackBerry on the MSG.
- IMSI (International Mobile Subscriber Identity) is a unique number that is assigned to the SIM card in use on the device.
- IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) is a unique number, which is assigned to the mobile phone hardware itself, and can usually be located on a sticker underneath the battery.
- DID (Device Identifier) is a platform specific device identifier. WinMobile and BB provide specific, repeatable APIs to acquire the values. Symbian does not use it. In Android, now that WiFi-only tablets are being dealt with, the WiFi MAC address is obtained (and hashed) and used as the Device ID. It will be consistent across a particular platform; but there is no consistent, globally defined cross-platform.
At times, even after acquiring this information, you still might be unable to locate the device. The best thing to do, at this point, is to instruct the user to attempt a registration with the device; even if it fails and reports the username, with which they tried to register. This will help you locate the device in the logs and verify that the information you received was accurate. Many times, Juniper has been sent inaccurate IMSI, IMEI, and DID’s from customers; only to find out later from the logs, the actual values.