Patent ID: 8793774

Claim:
A method, comprising: receiving, at a first time from a network device and in response to the network device detecting that a boot portion of a memory of the network device is corrupted, a configuration request that includes a first key, the network device being outside a secure network segment at the first time; granting a first class of access to the network device based on the first key; sending a configuration instruction to the network device in response to the granting the first class of access; receiving an association request that includes a second key from the network device at a second time after the first time; granting at a third time after the second time a second class of access to the network device based on the second key, the first class of access being different than the second class of access; and resetting, after the sending and before the granting of the second class of access, a timeout value associated with the first class of access in response to an extension request from the network device if a number of extension requests from the network device has not exceeded a predefined threshold.