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With “hardware as a service” as a business model, Internet Telephony Service Provider (ITSP) rent out hardware to their customers instead of selling it. It therefore can become necessary to limit the usage of the hardware to the own voice service, especially when no long term contract periods are in place. This practice has become widely known from the mobile phone industry as “SIM lock” or “netlock”.
With Snom phones you can achieve a similar protection by securing the boot loader, and with that prevent any factory reset of the phone. In this paper we explain how the boot loader lock works, which parameters need to be configured and how this can be integrated into a zero-touch deployment setup.
For Internet Telephony Service Provider (ITSP), the usage of Snom’s RDS to redirect phones facilitates a zero-touch installation experience for the customer, and provides a remote maintenance control of the phone to the ITSP.
If a factory reset is performed in a local area network without a connection to the internet, the user can then change the either
With this, the service provider would have lost the control over this phone.
To prevent the user from performing a factory reset of the phone, the ITSP can lock the boot loader with a number code (PIN). With this, the rescue mode of a Snom phone is password protected and a factory reset is no longer possible without knowing this number code.
In the following, we will describe first the manual procedure of setting up the boot loader lock and how it works. After that, the paper will explain how this protection can also be auto-provisioned.
If you are a service provider and the phones are shipped directly to your customer from distribution, you probably have an auto-provisioning server to configure the phones automatically once they connect to the internet. As any other parameter, you can also auto-provision the PIN for the uboot lock.
<uboot_lock>set:[12-digit PIN]</uboot_lock>
<uboot_lock>clear:[12-digit PIN]</uboot_lock>
It is important to note, that locking the boot loader is completely under your own risk. There is no way for Snom to recover a phone protected with an uboot lock. Therefore, please make sure that the PIN is stored safely, and cannot be accessed by any unauthorised persons.
Snom assumes no liability for any malfunctions, damage or misusage caused by this feature.
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