Error sending public key to server: Permission Denied

Hi all,

I’m a high school teacher who’ve been using the Particle Photon for a few years now. In that time, I’ve built up quite an inventory of Photons that no longer “work”. As I was working on restoring one to working order, I realized that me not having claimed the Photons could be a problem.

For example, I was trying to run “particle keys doctor” on one and got the following error:

c:\OpenSSL-Win32\bin>particle keys doctor 280035000f47353136383631
New Key Created!
Saved!
Saved!
attempting to add a new public key for device 280035000f47353136383631
Make sure your device is in DFU mode (blinking yellow), and that your computer is online.: Error sending public key to server: Permission Denied

From reading the reference docs and this community forum, I believe I’m getting that error because one of my old students still has the Photon claimed. I have 10+ of these Photons.

Is there someone I can reach out to at Particle about how to get all of these unclaimed? I have the physical Photons and I’m willing to work on them to figure out what’s wrong but I think this is going to be a hurdle for me.

This would be best dealt with by opening a support ticket

You can force-claim them by using the mobile app.

You could always try “particle update” and “particle flash --usb tinker” prior to that to get the firmware in a known good state.

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