1amt-howto(7) Miscellaneous Information Manual amt-howto(7)
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6 amt-howto - Intel AMT with linux mini howto
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9 What is AMT and why I should care?
10 AMT stands for "Active Management Technology". It provides some remote
11 management facilities. They are handled by the hardware and firmware,
12 thus they work independant from the operation system. Means: It works
13 before Linux bootet up to the point where it activated the network
14 interface. It works even when your most recent test kernel deadlocked
15 the machine. Which makes it quite useful for development machines ...
16 Intel AMT is part of the vPro Platform. Recent intel-chipset based
18 business machines should have it. My fairly new Intel SDV machine has
19 it too.
20 Documentation
23 Look here for documentation beyond this mini howto:
24 http://www.intel.com/technology/platform-technology/intel-amt/
25 Most useful to get started: "Intel AMT Deployment and Reference Guide"
26 Very short AMT enabling instructions.
29 Enter BIOS Setup.
30 * Enable AMT
31 Enter ME (Management Extention) Setup. Ctrl-P hotkey works for me.
33 * Login, factory default password is "admin".
34 * Change password. Trivial ones don't work, must include upper-
35 and lowercase letters, digits, special characters.
36 * Enable AMT Managment.
37 Reboot, Enter ME Setup again with AMT enabled.
39 * Configure AMT (hostname, network config, ...)
40 * Use SMB (Small Business) management mode. The other one
41 (Enterprise) requires Active Directory Service Infrastructure,
42 you don't want that, at least not for your first steps ...
43 Testing AMT
46 Take your browser, point it to http://machine:16992/. If you config‐
47 ured AMT to use DHCP (which is the default) the OS and the management
48 stack share the same IP address.
49 You must do that from a remote host as the NIC intercepts network pack‐
51 ets for AMT, thus it doesn't work from the local machine as the packets
52 never pass the NIC then. If everything is fine you'll see a greeting
53 page with a button for login.
54 You can login now, using "admin" as username and the password config‐
56 ured during setup. You'll see some pages with informations about the
57 machine. You can also change AMT settings here.
58 Control Machine
61 You might have noticed already while browing the pages: There is a
62 "Remote Control" page. You can remotely reset and powercycle the
63 machine there, thus recover the machine after booting a b0rken kernel,
64 without having someone walk over to the machine and hit the reset but‐
65 ton.
66 Serial-over-LAN (SOL) console
69 AMT also provides a virtual serial port which can be accessed via net‐
70 work. That gives you a serial console without a serial cable to
71 another machine.
72 If you have activated AMT and SOL the linux kernel should see an addi‐
74 tional serial port, like this on my machine:
75 [root@xeni ~]# dmesg | grep ttyS2
77 0000:00:03.3: ttyS2 at I/O 0xe000 (irq = 169) is a 16550A
78 Edit initab, add a line like this:
80 S2:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty ttyS2 115200 vt100-nav
82 You should add the serial port to /etc/securetty too so you are able to
84 login as root. Reload inittab ("init q"). Use amtterm to connect.
85 Tap enter. You should see a login prompt now and be able to login.
86 You can also use that device as console for the linux kernel, using the
88 usual "console=ttyS2,115200" kernel command line argument, so you see
89 the boot messages (and kernel Oopses, if any).
90 You can tell grub to use that serial device, so you can pick a working
92 kernel for the next boot. Usual commands from the grub manual, except
93 that you need "--port=0xe000" instead of "--unit=0" due to the non-
94 standard I/O port for the serial line (my machine, yours might use
95 another port, check linux kernel boot messages).
96 The magic command for the Xen kernel is "com1=115200,8n1,0xe000,0"
98 (again, you might have to replace the I/O port). The final '0' dis‐
99 ables the IRQ, otherwise the Xen kernel hangs at boot after enabling
100 interrupts.
101 Fun with Xen and AMT
104 The AMT network stack seems to become slightly confused when running on
105 a Xen host in DHCP mode. Everything works fine as long as only Dom0
106 runs. But if one starts a guest OS (with bridged networking) AMT sud‐
107 denly changes the IP address to the one the guest aquired via DHCP.
108 It is probably a good idea to assign a separate static IP address to
110 AMT then. I didn't manage to switch my machine from DHCP to static IP
111 yet though, the BIOS refuses to accept the settings. The error message
112 doesn't indicate why.
113 More fun with AMT
116 You might want to download the DTK (Developer Toolkit, source code is
117 available too) and play with it. The .exe is a self-extracting rar ar‐
118 chive and can be unpacked on linux using the unrar utility. The
119 Switchbox comes with a linux binary (additionally to the Windows
120 stuff). The GUI tools are written in C#. Trying to make them fly with
121 mono didn't work for me though (mono version 1.2.3 as shipped with
122 Fedora 7).
123
126 amtterm(1), gamt(1), amttool(1)
127 http://www.intel.com/technology/platform-technology/intel-amt/
129
131 Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@redhat.com>
132 (c) 2007 Gerd Hoffmann amt-howto(7)