Radical juxtaposition of concepts, isn’t it? Open source and ideas. Wow. Imagine…so many creative people without the means to realize their ideas and others lacking creativity but having deep pockets. Somehow everyone can win, right? Right. It’s time to look at the whole picture. There is a lot of brilliance out there; imagine sharing and combining those ideas. For the greater good. A network of creative thinking for the advancement of … everything. How can black boxes make life better but just for the select few? We need to open the box and invite everyone to participate. I’m adding a new category, “OSI” – Open Source Ideas. Anything posted there is open – open to be expanded upon, open to be utilized; I just ask for credit as the originator and all threads of the ideas contain the same credits.

Since switching to Fedora Core 5, and more precisely, Apache 2.2, I’ve been getting intermittent issues when trying to sync my WM5 device and also using OWA. For me, the solution was not to reinstall Outlook or to upgrade to ActiveSync 4.2; the problem is with the proxy server that front-ends the Exchange/IIS server. I’ve blogged about this issue before and even though the ActiveSync error codes are the same, the causes are different.

My environment is still the same as the previous posting with the exception of an Apache 2.2 front-end instead of the VPN tunnel. Here’s a link to setting up the Apache server. (NOTE: I’m not experiencing the same problems with a percent in the subject so I have not applied the workaround.)

The problem surfaced as errors during ActiveSync-ing. I would see an error code of 85010014. I discovered the real problems were with Apache returning 502 errors. The error logs were filled with lines of the following form:

[Wed Aug 02 14:58:38 2006] [error] [client 192.168.86.111] proxy: error reading status line from remote server
[Wed Aug 02 14:58:38 2006] [error] [client 192.168.86.111] proxy: Error reading from remote server returned by /Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync