this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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Thinking of buying a second hand Elite Desk small factor to throw Linux on. I'm worried about the HP firmware-bios thingy. Does it call home? Can I disable calling home somehow? Can it have access to my hard drive info ?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

We use HP EliteBooks and EliteDesks extensively at work. I even used to set them up in my old job, and as far as I'm aware, it doesn't connect to the Internet or "phone home" by default (although that could've changed in recent models). In any case, one of the nice things about the HP BIOSes is that it's very configurable - you can disable the automatic BIOS update checks, network adapter etc. I forget if there was an option to just disable the network stack, but what you could do is configure the UEFI network settings so that they're invalid - ie, set it to a random static IP + random DNS etc (eg: 0.0.0.0) so that it can't connect even if it tried.