1amt-howto(7) Miscellaneous Information Manual amt-howto(7)
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6 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-
25 amt/engage.htm
26 Most useful to get started: "Intel AMT Deployment and Reference Guide"
27 Very short AMT enabling instructions.
30 Enter BIOS Setup.
31 * Enable AMT
32 Enter ME (Management Extention) Setup. Ctrl-P hotkey works for me.
34 * Login, factory default password is "admin".
35 * Change password. Trivial ones don't work, must include upper-
36 and lowercase letters, digits, special characters.
37 * Enable AMT Managment.
38 Reboot, Enter ME Setup again with AMT enabled.
40 * Configure AMT (hostname, network config, ...)
41 * Use SMB (Small Business) management mode. The other one
42 (Enterprise) requires Active Directory Service Infrastructure,
43 you don't want that, at least not for your first steps ...
44 Testing AMT
47 Take your browser, point it to http://machine:16992/. If you config‐
48 ured AMT to use DHCP (which is the default) the OS and the management
49 stack share the same IP address.
50 You must do that from a remote host as the NIC intercepts network pack‐
52 ets for AMT, thus it doesn't work from the local machine as the packets
53 never pass the NIC then. If everything is fine you'll see a greeting
54 page with a button for login.
55 You can login now, using "admin" as username and the password config‐
57 ured during setup. You'll see some pages with informations about the
58 machine. You can also change AMT settings here.
59 Control Machine
62 You might have noticed already while browing the pages: There is a
63 "Remote Control" page. You can remotely reset and powercycle the
64 machine there, thus recover the machine after booting a b0rken kernel,
65 without having someone walk over to the machine and hit the reset but‐
66 ton.
67 Serial-over-LAN (SOL) console
70 AMT also provides a virtual serial port which can be accessed via net‐
71 work. That gives you a serial console without a serial cable to
72 another machine.
73 If you have activated AMT and SOL the linux kernel should see an addi‐
75 tional serial port, like this on my machine:
76 [root@xeni ~]# dmesg | grep ttyS2
78 0000:00:03.3: ttyS2 at I/O 0xe000 (irq = 169) is a 16550A
79 Edit initab, add a line like this:
81 S2:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty ttyS2 115200 vt100-nav
83 You should add the serial port to /etc/securetty too so you are able to
85 login as root. Reload inittab ("init q"). Use amtterm to connect.
86 Tap enter. You should see a login prompt now and be able to login.
87 You can also use that device as console for the linux kernel, using the
89 usual "console=ttyS2,115200" kernel command line argument, so you see
90 the boot messages (and kernel Oopses, if any).
91 You can tell grub to use that serial device, so you can pick a working
93 kernel for the next boot. Usual commands from the grub manual, except
94 that you need "--port=0xe000" instead of "--unit=0" due to the non-
95 standard I/O port for the serial line (my machine, yours might use
96 another port, check linux kernel boot messages).
97 The magic command for the Xen kernel is "com1=115200,8n1,0xe000,0"
99 (again, you might have to replace the I/O port). The final '0' dis‐
100 ables the IRQ, otherwise the Xen kernel hangs at boot after enabling
101 interrupts.
102 Fun with Xen and AMT
105 The AMT network stack seems to become slightly confused when running on
106 a Xen host in DHCP mode. Everything works fine as long as only Dom0
107 runs. But if one starts a guest OS (with bridged networking) AMT sud‐
108 denly changes the IP address to the one the guest aquired via DHCP.
109 It is probably a good idea to assign a separate static IP address to
111 AMT then. I didn't manage to switch my machine from DHCP to static IP
112 yet though, the BIOS refuses to accept the settings. The error message
113 doesn't indicate why.
114 More fun with AMT
117 You might want to download the DTK (Developer Toolkit, source code is
118 available too) and play with it. The .exe is a self-extracting rar ar‐
119 chive and can be unpacked on linux using the unrar utility. The
120 Switchbox comes with a linux binary (additionally to the Windows
121 stuff). The GUI tools are written in C#. Trying to make them fly with
122 mono didn't work for me though (mono version 1.2.3 as shipped with
123 Fedora 7).
124
127 amtterm(1), gamt(1), amttool(1)
128 http://www.intel.com/technology/platform-technology/intel-amt/
130
132 Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@redhat.com>
133 (c) 2007 Gerd Hoffmann amt-howto(7)