When trying to update your SNOM firmware on a 720 or D725 using the Web GUI and software update you may receive the following error message:

Software Update – Downloading Firmware – Could Not Resolve Host – Error: 6

This error could be caused by a number of reasons such as a DNS error however the one thing to check is whether your Web Admin password has any special characters in it.  In this particular situation the web admin password had an @ in it.  What was happening is it was passing on the rest of the password after the @ symbol when looking up the host name to download the firmware.  It didn’t matter whether the host name was full qualified or just the IP address.  It also didn’t matter whether the SNOM firmware file was downloaded locally to bypass any dns lookups by the DNS server.

In this particular instance we were upgrading the firmware for a SNOM D725 from 8.7.5.13 to 8.7.5.28.  We would paste the following in to the software update field:

http://downloads.snom.com/fw/snom725-8.7.5.28-SIP-r.bin.  Just by chance we noticed that on the firewall it was looking for the domain d1mn@downloads.snom which was not resolving.  When we used the IP address for downloads.snom.com it was looking for dm1n@188.40.44.83.  It turns out that dm1n was the rest of the web admin password after the @ symbol when looking at the logs.  As soon as we removed any special characters from the web admin password the issue was resolved.  Neither SNOM support nor the phone system provider were any help in this instance.