[Asterisk-biz] Unlocking post-Vonage ATA-186s, again

[Greg Boehnlein]

On Tue, 18 Jan 2005, Jeremy McNamara wrote:

> Roderick Montgomery wrote:
> 
> >Don't the time and materials required to execute your
> >undisclosed method well exceed the cost of Vonage's unlocking fee?
>
> 
> What time and materials?  Like I said, I had the PAP2 reconfigured to my 
> Asterisk box within 30 minutes after bringing it home from Staples.... 
> using nothing more than my laptop and a cross-over cable... The device 
> asks for something specific upon bootup, right?
> 
> I have shown a few people in this community how to do it... they are 
> simply not getting involved in this thread or telling others how to do 
> it, because I have asked them not to.

I wasn't party to the discussion or the unlocking ceremony at Astricon but 
I do know a fair amount about embedded OS design. In most cases, devices 
such as the PAP2 and most other Modem/Router/Firewall/Appliance type 
peripherals can be reloaded using a combination of bootp and tftp. I've 
done this for many many many devices..

I'll take a stab that what the PAP2 does is send out a BOOTP request 
looking for an IP, tftpserver and a downloadable firmware image, and if it 
doesn't find anything responding, will proceed to load the firmware from 
flash.

This isn't much different from using a PXE boot ROM for your network card 
to boot a diskless workstation from a remote server.

From: http://frank.harvard.edu/~coldwell/diskless/

"Back in the Good Old Days of low-numbered RFCs, companies like NCD worked 
out that the best way to boot a diskless machine (in the case of NCD, an 
X-Terminal) was to have it run BOOTP to obtain an IP address and the name 
of a boot image file from a BOOTP server, then use TFTP to download the 
boot image from a possibly different server and launch itself from there. 
Not a whole lot has changed since then except that BOOTP has been expanded 
and renamed DHCP, and the processes of getting a bootable image to the 
client is done in two steps on PCs: first a boot loader is downloaded and 
started, which will then download and start the operating system image."

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