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Silly Required Registration Move
Greetings, Our company recently sunset some office locations. These locations returned back a handful of PoE+ managed switches that were functioning satisfactorily. We have some new office locati...
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Isn't it interesting that the new firmware that hobbled a fully functional product was freely available from Netgear without requiring registration? Now I wonder, why would that be?
I've burned too much time on this already. Your business practice is more than suspect and has nothing to do with the IT Security of your clients. Why even pretend otherwise? There is no valid reason have to "unlock" the full feature set of a product that had it available previously. Period, full stop.
- You could roll-back to earlier firmware - issue gone.
- Put in an estimate date with the registration - you can explain this in case you have a warranty claim later on (this is unrelated to the new policy, this issue you would have before) - and fetch the key required from support.netgear.com
The effort is a few minutes for the registration (if the switch has Internet acccess it's even easier). A problem that isn't a problem....
PS. Think again why these switches were not registered with Netgear at the installation time. Either it was pure laziness of the installer, or it was an attempt towards a potential warranty fraud. Figure now the (non-stated!) reason for the mandatory registration ....
It might surprise you that aversion to production registration doesn't have to be lazy or nefarious in nature. There are other valid reasons. I'm not trying now, nor ever in the past, to exercise any warranty "rights". I'm looking to redeploy it, not return or exchange it! In no shape, way, or form is the Netgear company being shortchanged by the repurposing of an existing piece of equipment. On the other hand, the Customer sure has!
Trying to track down a single item purchase through Accounts Payable from years ago, a few minutes, lol. You're right about the potential to roll back to the previous firmware. No interest now, it really just can-kicks the problem. Netgear no longer appears trustworthy.
"Figure now the (non-stated!) reason for the mandatory registration..." uh huh. Look, there is simply no excuse for removing functionality with a firmware "upgrade". If fraud is really the concern, don't honor warranty or support without registration. Easy. If access to future patches/updates is the ruse, then registration should have been a prerequisite to accessing the offending current firmware. But it wasn't. It was essentially a one-way registration trap.
On a side note, if your switches have internet access... well, that's almost criminally negligent.
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