In the last part of the latest edition of the Intel Technology Journal (ITJ), I write about a new usage for Intel AMT and peer-to-peer computing. See Extreme Programming with Intel® vPro™ Technology: Pushing the Limits with Innovative Software.

The general idea is that you can use Intel AMT to represent a computer while it’s asleep to the rest of the peers. Normally, when you have lots of computers talking to each other in a peer-to-peer network and one of them goes to sleep, it just disappears from the network, just as if it had been completely disconnected.

Intel AMT can allow for network presence of a sleeping computer in a peer-to-peer network by creating an Intel AMT guest account that is very limited in its access (General Info + 3PDS) but allows other computers in the network to occasionally connect and read it’s sleeping state. This has many benefits: In the past, peer-to-peer networks required all computers to be always on; this is no longer the case. By using 3PDS, even off, computers are still discoverable and searchable.

Imagine for a moment 100 sleeping computers in a room. Someone wakes one up and searches for a tutorial video file located on one of the other sleeping computers. With Intel AMT and a peer-to-peer network, software can search all of the computers, find the one with the file, wake it up and download the file. Everything is very power efficient.

This technique does not have to be used only for files; you can find hardware, free disk space, backups, software and hardware services, etc.

Ylian

Ok, I have one more trick for all you Intel AMT developers trying to build high security software. One good use of Intel AMT is for power state monitoring, one could build an application that polls many computers for their power state and plots the results on a graph. You can see just how “green” your network is. Typically to do this, you call the Intel AMT method to get the power state periodically located in the Remote Control security realm of Intel AMT.

The way Intel AMT security realms are designed: granting a user access to the Remote Control realm gives this user access to reading the power state but also turning on and shutting down (hard shutdown) the computer. As a result, the nice monitoring application you are building can only be run by trusted administrators. It would be nice to be able to create an Intel AMT user with only minimal access to features that could only be used to read the power state and not much else. This is not technically possible…

But wait, there is a trick! Create a user account within Intel AMT with only General Info and Hardware Inventory access. These two realms are the minimum needed to access the Intel AMT web UI. Then, using a normal browser we can load the Web UI and notice that the computer power state is displayed on the web page! With a little code, we can extract this information out of what is normally a human readable web page.

Of course, this is a hack and your software may need to be upgraded as new firmware may change the WebUI. Still, it’s such a good trick; I use it with great success in my own code. Note that the Intel AMT 2.0 page is a little different from Intel AMT 2.5 and above. So far, I have to handle 2.0 differently but the same parsing code seems to work on all Intel AMT computers (up to 5.0). Also, that web UI page is very fast and you get, as bonus information, the computer’s unique identifier and Intel AMT time in a single call.

The only drawback I have noticed is that the WebUI will show the string “Standby” for both S1 and S3 states. So you can’t tell exactly what power state it’s sleeping in. Otherwise, you can detect S0, S4 and S5 states.

Ylian

Ylian created this based on his class at IDF (Intel Developers Forum). this video is 23 minutes and well worth the time. If you are getting started, looking for a refresher or just want to hear one of the brightest folks talk about AMT, this is your video..

Enjoy..

I often get questions about the Intel AMT serial port. Ever since the DTK started to make heavy use of it, serial-over-LAN has gotten a lot of attention. First, how do you change the COM port number of the Intel AMT serial port? The COM number (COM3: for example) is assigned by the operating system, so you don’t see that is any AMT/BIOS/MEBx option. You have to go into Microsoft Windows Device Manager, go to the properties of the “Intel(R) Active Management Technology – SOL” port. Then go into the “Port Settings” tab and press the advanced button. There, you can change the COM port.

Also, it’s often useful for application to be able to automatically detect the AMT serial port. In Intel AMT Outpost, I scan the device drivers looking for the “Intel(R) Active Management Technology – SOL” device and read the COM port number that follows in that string. Sofar, it seems to work great, even in non-English countries, something I am always worried about.

The Intel AMT serial port is much like any other serial port, but it has a PCI device identifier that is not normally known to Microsoft Windows and so, Windows does not know what to do with this device. On Intel’s web site, there is an SOL driver available. The serial driver itself is just a small .INF that tells Microsoft Windows to load and use the standard serial driver. In fact, one can manually force the standard Windows serial driver to be used for this device. You need to go in the device manager and pick a driver from the list, select Microsoft as the manufacturer and you will see it. Even if it’s possible, I don’t recommend it because the DTK code will no longer recognize that COM port as being the AMT port, it’s going to work but will have the wrong name for auto-detection.

Lastly, if someone needed to know if a computer is AMT enabled without having to load any drivers, one way to do it would be to detect the presence of the Intel AMT serial port. It is always present even when AMT is un-provisioned, and it can’t be turned off, unless AMT is disabled entirely in MEBx. This can be a good way to figure out if you need to start considering a computer for AMT setup.

Ylian

(Intel AMT Blog)

Last week Intel sent me to Israel for an Intel only gathering of engineers, architects and specialists that work on Intel AMT. I was honored to attend and also to be a speaker taking about the progress made with the DTK. First of all, I want to thank all of the people in Intel Israel for making this trip a great success. I also got to hear about many DTK success stories and it all of the hard work worth it. I was especially surprised with the DTK’s success in Asia, but also all over the world. I am still not sure if it’s the tutorial videos, the translations or what.

In addition to the meetings, we had a great time visiting the old city of Jerusalem, the Dead Sea and later on my own the city of Elat and Petra in Jordan. I got some of the most wonderful pictures and uploaded some on Google servers here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/ysainthilaire/Israel200802

These pictures cover the 10 days of my trip, starting with the old city then me playing in the mud and floating in the Dead Sea and finishing with my visit to Jordan. Jordan was probably this highlight of this trip, there is something just odd about traveling in this vast desert and realizing that I was in the country that had a common border with Iraq. For most of us in the US, it seems so distant. The city of Petra in Jordon has unique sand stone carvings in the walls. Some people will also notice that the Indiana Jones movie was filmed at this location. Petra was named one of the new 7 wonders of the world and as a result got a surge in tourism. It’s a wonderful place, hot and laid back.

Most people travel by air from Jerusalem to Elat and Jordan, but I opted to take the bus. It’s a 4 and a half hour trip thru amazing scenery. It’s also inexpensive, about 12 to 15$ and much more convenient than by airplane. I will say that except for the bus, everything was very expensive in US dollars. It’s a shame the dollar is so weak, I don’t except to make many of these trips.

Last week was the holocaust memorial day in Israel and I happened to visit the Wailing Wall with some of my Intel co-workers just as 1000’s of people where attending a ceremony that was being broadcast live on TV. One of my pictures shows all the people at the wall.

The Dead Sea was really amazing, it’s so saturated with salt that you simply float. This sea is the lowest point on Earth I am told, it’s 1,378 feet below sea level. Your ears pop on the way there as the air pressure increases. As pressure increases so does the temperature which will often be 10 degrees hotter than Jerusalem. The Dead Sea is well known for the Dead Sea salts used as skin treatment. It also gave me a great excuse to play in the mud! You let it dry and wash it off to wonderful skin… but it’s also just loads of fun.

To sum it up, this 10 day trip was simply amazing. In addition to meeting many people who use the DTK, I also got to see and experience some unique places I will never forget.

Ylian (Intel AMT Blog)