In the short history of the Intel AMT Developer Tool Kit (DTK), this is probably the single release with the most changes and improvements in it. One look at the change log and you notice that there are lots of improvements in many areas of the DTK. In this blog, I want to touch on a few of the major new features.

Intel AMT Guardport, a C/C++ version of the Intel AMT Outpost serial agent. Many have noticed that Intel AMT Outpost is a quite powerful Intel AMT agent. The main problem with Outpost is that it is rather fat software and makes use of .NET. It's not practical if you are going to run it on 1000's of computers or most importantly, add it to a recovery OS image. Intel AMT Guardpost is a light weight port of the most important feature of Outpost, the serial agent. Guardpost is a statically linked .exe file (no other .DLL's required) that finds the SOL COM port automatically and binds to it. It offers a command prompt and the same binary-over-SOL support that Outpost supports. In this version, Guardpost is still very limited but supports remote process monitoring and the most impressive of the Outpost features: TCP-over-SOL.

Intel AMT Interceptor, a trace and debug tool that connects to Intel AMT Switchbox. This new tool takes advantage of a new debug port in Switchbox to show in real-time all of the traffic going thru Switchbox. It shows in real time HTTP, SOL and IDE-R traffic flowing thru and for each data chunk, its source and destination. It even works with TLS since a console with authenticate with Switchbox and Switchbox will perform its own TLS connection to Intel AMT. At a minimum, this new tool is very educational for people curious to see in-depth, what Intel AMT network traffic looks like.

Intel AMT DTK Internationalization effort. A lot of effort is going into internalization of the Intel AMT DTK. This started months ago with Simplified Chinese and Japanese support. In order to make it easier to internationalize the DTK (or any .NET application) we started work on a Resource Translator tools. It's only part of the source code package and it's just an early tool right now. I have used it to start translation into French of the Intel AMT Terminal. Some will also notice that some of the Terminal is translated into Hebrew to test to right-to-left support and NetStatus is translated to Russian.

Lots more improvements are coming up for the DTK. Mostly, I have to code all the time and I sometimes have to put aside answering mails for a while. I will try to answer more mails next week.

Audio File: Ylian's audio blog on the Intel AMT DTK v0.38 (.mp3)

Ylian

We just released the Intel AMT Developer Tool Kit (DTK) v0.37 . Here are the highlights of the changes in v0.37:

• Intel AMT Monitor in Japanese. Improved Japanese internalization and now, Intel AMT Monitor is also in Japanese. Thanks to 3 Intel employees Intel Japan, the Intel AMT DTK and Intel vPro products are much more successful in Japan. For people who did not know, English, Japanese and Simplified Chinese are all included in the standard Intel AMT DTK package.

• Improved Commander support for Switchbox. Intel AMT Commander can be used to connect to Intel AMT Switchbox in TLS mode, and now, Commander will show connection warnings if the certificate is invalid and can also be used to issue a new certificate to Intel AMT Switchbox. This makes using Intel AMT Switchbox with full TLS security easier than ever.

• Intel AMT Commander Network Feature. Now includes NIC info, environment discovery & VPN routing. Intel AMT Commander can how display all of the network configuration settings of the ME, set ME's Sx state ping response, set the VPN routing flag (AMT 2.5 only) and now fully supports setting the environment detection parameters (AMT 2.5 and 3.0 only). Now Intel AMT Commander can be used to fully experiment with these new platform features.

• First attempt at running Commander on Linux and MacOS. This new version for DTK includes a new folder called "MonoEdition" and source code includes a new "Debug-Mono" compiler target in an attempt to run Intel AMT Commander on the MONO framework. MONO is an open source project attempting to build a compatible Microsoft .NET framework on Linux. So far, only a very limited version of Commander can run on MONO 1.2.4 within Microsoft Windows, and no luck running on Linux yet. It's likely that with the release for MONO 2.0 later this year, Commander will run pretty well.

In addition to these, we made many more changes and bug fixes. For example: The terminal will now show if a laptop is connected on AC or is using battery. As usual, we encourage people to test and submit bugs & feedback on Intel AMT Commander, Director, Outpost, Monitor & Switchbox.

Audio blog: Ylian's audio blog on the Intel AMT DTK v0.37 (.mp3)

Updated screens:

Ylian (Intel AMT Blog)