New Update Mechanism in snom IP Phones

snom IP phones are one of the early IP appliances to incorporate HTTP updates as a safer and easier way of updating devices as opposed to the classic UDP based TFTP. However the HTTP approaches centralistic nature meant that all customers where prompted for every new version. Since snom’s newest SIP might be ahead of the level of some of the elements of a clients architecture this had the potential of new versions causing undesired interoperability issues since it is virtually impossible for snom to test every scenario.

To give full control to the service provider or customer snom created a new mechanism in Version 2.02g that allows clients and service providers to disable central notifications and updates from snom over the phone’s web interface or settings file server.

In the following Base Settings page you can see which versions of the Firmware or Bootloader the phone currently is running and from where it will try to get new versions.

Snom also incorporated a new update server mechanism into the snom 4S Proxy & Registrar - Platform that Empowers the service provider or customer to use his SIP Server as the update server for his network and take full control of future firmware releases.

In practice to update to the new 2.0g+ version you need to reboot your phone or if current settings prevent loading a new version you can printout and save your current settings and do a Factory Reset followed by a Reboot to cause the phone to upload version 2.02g or newer.

Now you can select what update scheme you want to implement in your phones:

1-Ask for Updates (Default)
2-Ask for Updating Bootloader only
3-Ask for updating Firmware only
4-Never Update but do load settings files
5-Never Update and do not load settings files

In the Settings-Update section of the phone’s webserver you can also specifically name firmware versions you want to download form any of the snom SIP servers that have that firmware version on file.

You should be able to specify both snom and abpusa.com SIP servers as well as your own snom4S to download these files in the future.

snom 4S SIP Server

Users who are managing their own snom 4S SIP server can now use a new feature Software Management to control the Firmware and Bootloader versions in their network by specifically assigning versions to SIP accounts.

Currently this new update server mechanism will be supported by all snom phones but we believe soon several of our partners will also be able to be managed by the system.