Hi everyone. I have not been posting much lately, but have been keeping busy writing a book and white papers on Intel AMT. In the last section of the Intel Technology Journal article on extreme usages, I talk about how Intel AMT could be used to build a peer-to-peer mesh network, and that is what I have been working on for the last few months. More to come on this I am sure.

Right now, I want to talk about Wake-on-LAN and Intel AMT. I read somewhere that wake-on-LAN is obsolete with Intel AMT, but I want to disagree and explain why Intel AMT in fact makes Wake-on-LAN better. For people how don’t know, Wake-on-LAN is a way to wake-up a computer using a magic packet composed anywhere in the payload of “FFFF FFFF FFFF” + 16 repetitions of the MAC address of the computer you want to wake up.

In normal circumstances, the magic packet can only be really used within the same Ethernet subnet as the computer you want to wakeup. All this changes if the target computer supports Intel AMT, since even when sleeping or in soft-off, the Intel AMT computer will defend its IP address (ARP Protocol), it’s now possible to send a directed magic packet to a computer across many routers and have it reach its destination correctly and so, wake up the PC.

Now, why would you use a magic packet if you can use Intel AMT to do the same? Everything has to do with security. Because of how Intel AMT security realms are designed, granting permission within Intel AMT for a users to wake up a computer, also grants the same user permission to shutdown the PC at anytime (and not a nice shutdown too). You can’t just grant only the “power on” access in Intel AMT and so, this is a security concern.

In conclusion, if we want other general users to be able to wake up a PC on the network to perform routine tasks (access files, backup data, etc .). Making use of Wake-on-LAN + Intel AMT makes a lot of sense. With Intel AMT PC’s, Wake-on-LAN now works better than ever.

Ylian