Buying Used or "Like New" Phones

I just purchased a "Like New" phone from a vendor on Amazon. When I got it, it proceeded to "phone home" and retrieved some sort of configuration. At the same time, it also changed the administrator password so that the default password no longer worked. This was for a Yealink T54W phone.

To fix this problem, the official way is to contact your seller and have them contact the manufacturer and have them take the phone off the manufacturer's auto provisioning service. You will probably need to supply your vendor with the mac address of the phone.

In my case, I got the phone on a Saturday but did not hear back from the seller until business opened on Monday. Once back in the office he was successful in removing it and the phone no longer called home. Yea Team! (pun intended :-)

Being the impatient type, I spent all day Saturday and Sunday night researching how to get around this. By Sunday morning I was successful and had a nice, new working phone on the Mesh. Boiling things down, here were my high-level steps. These might be particular to Yealink, so YMMV.

1. Boot up the phone without connection to the Internet. I used a stand-alone hAP Lite node to do this.
2. Once it has booted, do a factory reset. The phone will not be able to phone home and will indeed go to factory settings. At this point, the normal default login/password works.
3. In parallel with all this, set up a provisioning server. For Yealink, this is either a tftp or http server.
4. Generate a valid configuration file for the phone and upload it to the provisioning server. In my case, Yealink has a Windows based configuration tool that does the job very nicely.
5. Configure the provisioning server info into the phone. For Yealink, the syntax is <protocol>://<provisioning server address>/directory/subdirectory
  e.g. tftp://10.2.3.4/yealink
6. Plug a cable into the WAN port of the hAP Lite to give the node access to the provisioning server.
7. Manually kick off a provisioning update. If successful, less than a minute later, the phone should report success. You should also see your new config on the phone display.

At this point, your phone should be ready to go. Remove the hAP Lite and plug the phone into your node with its permanent connection. In addition, the phone should no longer phone home to get provisioned. Depending on configuration settings, in the future, it may contact your provisioning server on bootup and/or at other times.

Be aware, that until your entry has been removed from the manufacturer's server, any reset to factory defaults will erase your server from the phone and revert the phone back to phoning home. The only fix for this condition is to ensure that your phone is removed from the manufacturer's server.

73, Mark, N2MH
MeshPhone 973-2222
HH 88-973-2111