NAME

       amt-howto - Intel AMT with linux mini howto

DESCRIPTION

   What is AMT and why I should care?
       AMT  stands for "Active Management Technology".  It provides some remote management facilities.  They are
       handled by the hardware and firmware, thus they work independant from the operation  system.   Means:  It
       works  before  Linux bootet up to the point where it activated the network interface.  It works even when
       your most recent test kernel deadlocked the  machine.   Which  makes  it  quite  useful  for  development
       machines ...

       Intel AMT is part of the vPro Platform.  Recent intel-chipset based business machines should have it.  My
       fairly new Intel SDV machine has it too.

   Documentation
       Look here for documentation beyond this mini howto:
       http://www.intel.com/technology/platform-technology/intel-amt/
       Most useful to get started: "Intel AMT Deployment and Reference Guide"

   Very short AMT enabling instructions.
       Enter BIOS Setup.
              * Enable AMT

       Enter ME (Management Extention) Setup.  Ctrl-P hotkey works for me.
              * Login, factory default password is "admin".
              * Change password.  Trivial ones don't work, must include upper- and  lowercase  letters,  digits,
              special characters.
              * Enable AMT Managment.

       Reboot, Enter ME Setup again with AMT enabled.
              * Configure AMT (hostname, network config, ...)
              *  Use SMB (Small Business) management mode.  The other one (Enterprise) requires Active Directory
              Service Infrastructure, you don't want that, at least not for your first steps ...

   Testing AMT
       Take your browser, point it to http://machine:16992/.  If you configured AMT to use DHCP  (which  is  the
       default) the OS and the management stack share the same IP address.

       You  must  do that from a remote host as the NIC intercepts network packets for AMT, thus it doesn't work
       from the local machine as the packets never pass the NIC then.   If  everything  is  fine  you'll  see  a
       greeting page with a button for login.

       You  can  login now, using "admin" as username and the password configured during setup.  You'll see some
       pages with informations about the machine.  You can also change AMT settings here.

   Control Machine
       You might have noticed already while browing the pages: There  is  a  "Remote  Control"  page.   You  can
       remotely  reset and powercycle the machine there, thus recover the machine after booting a b0rken kernel,
       without having someone walk over to the machine and hit the reset button.

   Serial-over-LAN (SOL) console
       AMT also provides a virtual serial port which can be accessed via  network.   That  gives  you  a  serial
       console without a serial cable to another machine.

       If  you have activated AMT and SOL the linux kernel should see an additional serial port, like this on my
       machine:

         [root@xeni ~]# dmesg | grep ttyS2
         0000:00:03.3: ttyS2 at I/O 0xe000 (irq = 169) is a 16550A

       Edit initab, add a line like this:

         T2:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty ttyS2 115200 vt100-nav

       You should add the serial port to /etc/securetty too so you are able to login as  root.   Reload  inittab
       ("init q").  Use amtterm to connect.  Tap enter.  You should see a login prompt now and be able to login.

       You  can  also  use  that  device as console for the linux kernel, using the usual "console=ttyS2,115200"
       kernel command line argument, so you see the boot messages (and kernel Oopses, if any).

       You can tell grub to use that serial device, so you can pick a working kernel for the next  boot.   Usual
       commands from the grub manual, except that you need "--port=0xe000" instead of "--unit=0" due to the non-
       standard I/O port for the serial line (my machine, yours might use another port, check linux kernel  boot
       messages).

       The  magic command for the Xen kernel is "com1=115200,8n1,0xe000,0" (again, you might have to replace the
       I/O port).  The final '0' disables the IRQ, otherwise  the  Xen  kernel  hangs  at  boot  after  enabling
       interrupts.

   Fun with Xen and AMT
       The  AMT  network  stack  seems  to  become  slightly  confused  when running on a Xen host in DHCP mode.
       Everything works fine as long as only Dom0 runs.  But if one starts a guest OS (with bridged  networking)
       AMT suddenly changes the IP address to the one the guest aquired via DHCP.

       It is probably a good idea to assign a separate static IP address to AMT then.  I didn't manage to switch
       my machine from DHCP to static IP yet though, the BIOS refuses to accept the settings.  The error message
       doesn't indicate why.

   More fun with AMT
       You  might  want  to download the DTK (Developer Toolkit, source code is available too) and play with it.
       The .exe is a self-extracting rar archive and can be unpacked on linux  using  the  unrar  utility.   The
       Switchbox  comes  with  a linux binary (additionally to the Windows stuff).  The GUI tools are written in
       C#.  Trying to make them fly with mono didn't work for me though (mono  version  1.2.3  as  shipped  with
       Fedora 7).

SEE ALSO

       amtterm(1), gamt(1), amttool(1)

       http://www.intel.com/technology/platform-technology/intel-amt/

WRITTEN BY

       Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@redhat.com>

                                             (c) 2007 Gerd Hoffmann                                 amt-howto(7)