We released the Intel AMT DTK v0.36 on the public web site and in this blog, I want to focus on a new trick I am using in Intel AMT Commander and Intel AMT Outpost.
For a long time, many people have asked me to create an easy way to send a clean "sleep", "shutdown", "reset", "logoff" command to the Intel AMT computer. We can already do this using serial-over-LAN but I wanted to find a way to communicate this message using HECI and I did. I call it "Reverse-Watchdog".
Instead of using the watchdog feature normally, the agent (Intel AMT Outpost) does a heartbeat on an agent that does not exist. Once the console (Intel AMT Commander) creates it, the agent registration will work and the agent will get the "agent timeout" value (an unsigned short). The agent will pass this value up the stack as a "notification message ID" from the console, and the agent will take action based on that number. Also, the fact that the agent registers will cause the agent to switch to "running" state and this will cause the console to get a confirmation of reception. The console then removes the watchdog. Intel AMT Outpost is instrumented to ignore the notification if the agent already exists in startup, so leaving an agent in AMT will not cause the notification to be used. This is a neat trick if you want to communicate to lots of agents on many computers without using SOL or in-band network traffic.
Ylian (Intel AMT Blog)
Intel vPro Expert Center Blog
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Ylian Saint-Hilaire
Yes, it's an Outpost feature. You can't really do a clean shutdown without the OS being involved. I was hoping that at some point you could use AMT to simulate an ACPI shut-off, just like pressing the power button on the case. It does not seem to be avaialble in AMT yet.
Terry Cutler
in response to: scdets
Some implementation utilize WMI call to initiate a shutdown sequence.
Once the OS is off, AMT is used to power-off the box.
(BTW: Another cool implementation is changing from AMT SoL for pre-OS boot to ISV agent remote console when OS is loaded)
Ylian Saint-Hilaire
in response to: Terry Cutler
I have to look into WMI, but if I am going to have an agent running anyway, this reverse watchdog trick works pretty well. As for changing from SOL to graphics once an agent is running, I know about that. I just wish I could code 100 hours a day.
Hey Ylian it is Steve Kahn. AMT does a hard reset, how are doing a graceful shutdown "closing applications and rest of the OS. Is using outpost required?