For my first bite sized “Matt shares stuff he knows” article I thought I’d share a nifty little tidbit I picked up when we recently had the Grandstream team visit us in office in New Zealand. We were discussing a recent firmware that was released for the GXP21xx phone series where the upgrade allows local firmware upgrade capabilities from your desktop machine. Sounds simple right? Traditional methods of upgrading IP phone firmware involve using either a TFTP server which can be an outright pain to use (the T should stand for tragic, rather than trivial), or sweet talking the local web admin to host the latest firmware file for you. The team mentioned a freebie third party HTTP tool called HFS server and gave me a quick overview of it. It is surprisingly simple to use and is very lightweight! Using it basically broke down as follows

  1. Google and download HFS (~1 minute)
  2. Run the application (~10 seconds)
  3. Drag and drop the new firmware file into the main app window (~3 seconds)
  4. Log into the phone web UI (~20 seconds)
  5. Click the maintenance tab, click Upgrade and Provisioning and set Firmware Server Path to the IP and port of HFS on the local machine, and tick “Upgrade via” HTTP button (Copy paste from HFS – ~10 seconds)
  6. Take a sip of a hot beverage (~7 seconds)
  7. Tick the radio button for “Yes, check for upgrade every” with a value of 60 (~5 seconds)
  8. Click save and apply (all of ~2 seconds)
  9. Reboot the phone and the upgrade begins!

Total time clocking in around 2 minutes to set up and have a phone upgrading to the latest firmware file from a super simple local HTTP server.

Until next time!

Matt (the tech guy from the phone who mentioned this post) – Contact me if you have further questions.

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