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)

I am glad you inform everyone that the Intel AMT DTK is back online and once again, my apologies for the interruption. Version v0.52x was released, with just a few fixes over the previously posted v0.51x. It's mostly the same as before, not many new features, but if you have experiences problems in the past, try this version.

Probably the area where the DTK is improving most is with general stability and WSMAN. When using Intel AMT 3.0, Intel AMT Commander and Intel AMT Outpost will use WSMAN instead of SOAP. Since all the calls are different, many new bugs showed up. As we get the benefit of more testing and feedback, the code keeps improving. Users can force Commander to use SOAP by going to the "View" - "Advanced properties". The second tab has a check box to remove using WSMAN first. WSMAN will of course still be used if Commander determines that WSMAN is the only available option.

Next week I am once again heading to Israel to meet with this Intel AMT firmware development team. Last year I had a pretty shaky flight over, something I had blogged about. Hopefully this year will be better. At Intel, this is going to be the ultimate meeting of everyone related to AMT, so I will get to meet some of the other people that post on the forums, and many of the people that I get the most complicated answers from.

Ylian (Intel AMT Blog)

Years before I started working on Intel AMT, designers where creating a list of usages that would be enabled by Intel AMT. The list included, I presume, usages around 3PDS, remote reboot to BIOS, disk redirection, etc. Many of the Intel AMT usages that are promoted on the Intel web site. When I started work on the DTK, a personal challenge had always been to find new ways of using existing features to do different and sometimes unexpected things. Create new usages for Intel AMT that it was never originally designed to do. I now present my top 5 abuses of existing features.

TCP-over-Serial-over-LAN. The Intel AMT serial port I am told, was originally designed as an easy way to remotely take control of the BIOS and recovery OS remotely. Designers needed a way for BIOS to be able to send test display data to a remote console. A virtual serial port was a great solution. It so happens that in the original design, this serial port was always enabled and usable, even when the normal OS was running. This allows a serial agent to talk to a console while bypassing the OS’s network stack. This is interesting on its own and I started work on a serial agent of my own. Things took a weird twist when I started sending binary data and sending files over this serial port, making it very valuable. It’s only a few weeks later that I realized I could also send TCP traffic over this serial link, making it possible to contact TCP services on the Intel AMT computer even if the network stack was disabled. A few days later, I showcased the first demonstration of VNC-over-SOL, and turning this abuse of the serial port into an instant hit. To this day, VNC-over-SOL is still, one of the most impressive demonstrations of Intel AMT.

Reverse Watchdog. When Intel sales people demonstrate Intel AMT to customers, they often get asked if you can shutdown gracefully an Intel AMT computer using Intel AMT. The simple answer was no, Intel AMT will perform a brutal shutdown or reset upon request. To perform operations like a clean shutdown or reset, sleep or hibernation requires the involvement of the OS. You could tell a serial agent like Intel AMT Outpost to perform the shutdown, but that required opening the serial connection and could be a problem if you had to shutdown many computers. I needed a way to pass a small amount of information to a running Intel AMT agent on the PC, do it using SOAP/WSMAN only and if possible get confirmation of reception. We could store the command into 3PDS and have the agent read it periodically, but 3PDS required setup and that little amount of data would have required allocation of a 4K flash page. The solution came when looking at the agent presence feature. When a console creates a new agent, the agent can now register this agent locally. The agent also get the timeout of the agent in seconds (from 1 to 65535), this would be the key. By constantly trying to register a known GUID, Intel AMT Outpost could see if the agent existed or not. If suddenly the registration works, the timeout value would indicate that type of shutdown operation to perform. Better yet, the simple fact that registration occurred changes the state of the agent to “Running”, confirming to the console that the message was indeed received. Today the Intel AMT Terminal has “Agent Commands” in the remote control that allows a user to perform soft operations when the agent is running, even if the OS network stack is not working.

Mouse over serial. A few months back I started work on a smaller version of Intel AMT Outpost called Intel AMT Guardpost. The idea was that if a serial agent was going to be useful, it was going to need to run on a recovery OS, run in the background with no dependencies and with as little footprint as possible (Is it not annoying to have all there background processes running?). The C/C++ version of Intel AMT Outpost was on its way. One feature I always wanted to work on was a remote Windows command prompt; it took over a week to finally pull this off. I could now remotely shell to DOS and perform basic command line operations. I could also enter the command like editor with the “Edit” command at which point, the temptation to support the mouse-over-serial-over-LAN was a must have. Using the binary serial protocol, I added the support to the terminal in a few hours. To this day, it’s still a fun and amazing demonstration of outstanding remote manageability.

IDE-R within the OS. A few days after first enabling IDE-R within Intel AMT Commander, I stumbled upon something I had not noticed before. If an administrator where to start IDE redirection and the OS was to re-scan its plug & play devices, the additional floppy and CDROM drive would show up in Microsoft Windows. This was immediately interesting since transferring files over the serial port was limited to 115kb/sec a very slow speed in today’s world. With IDE-R, you can copy files at around CDROM 4x speed on a local network. All I needed was a way for Intel AMT Outpost to cause the OS to rescan its plug & play devices. A few hours later the “HWRESCAN” command was built and for the first time, an administrator could mount a CDROM remotely and install a patch as high speed without ever using the OS’s network stack. This feature also turned out to be an excellent compliment to VNC-over-SOL.

Fast data path using IDE-R. This is not an idea I never built into the DTK, but I wanted to add it to this list since it would also be an interesting was to use existing features in new ways. The serial-over-LAN feature turned out to be extremely valuable, but it is also slow. Serial ports are very inefficient. One way someone could speed things up is to use IDE-R as a fast by-pass to the OS. An administrator would mount a virtual floppy disk drive containing a single file. This file, would not really exist, it would contain different data each time it was read, making it possible to send data to an OS agent thru Intel AMT at much higher speeds. Also, since the floppy is a read/write device, the agent could write into the virtual file data that it wants to send to the console. It would be quite a bit of work to pull this off, but it certainly seems possible. Someone would just have to know the internal format of an .img file.

That’s my top 5. I realize this is probably a rather advanced blog article, but this is proof that you can have a lot of fun to any technologies.

Ylian (Intel AMT Blog)

Serial-over-LAN is quite useful for taking control of a computer, making changes to the BIOS and when Intel AMT Outpost or Guardpost is running, getting a management command prompt even when the OS network driver is disabled. What if you have to repeat the BIOS change on 100’s of computers? Say you want to change a BIOS boot option on 100 computers? Or want to test the reliability of a new computer platform? The Intel AMT Serial-over-LAN scripting can help.

Connect using Intel AMT Commander to the Intel AMT computer and select “Take Control” to enter the VT100 terminal. Make sure everything works well and you can connect and perform Serial-over-LAN correctly. Go in the “Terminal” menu and select “Script editor…” and write a script like this one, using the user interface to guide you:

LABEL “start”
RESET bios
WAIT 40 seconds.
RESET powerdown
WAIT 15 seconds
JUMP “start”

WAITFOR “abcd”

SEND “dir\r”

It's time for another release of the Intel AMT DTK v0.48x. The "X" stands for external since for the last two months I have been working on upcoming Intel platforms features and so, not releasing public updates as often as I use to. In this release there are so many changes, I can't really go thru them all.

I think users will see the Intel AMT Commander UI has been improved a lot, and some work has been done to improve responsiveness. The look of the UI is also improved, especialy heuristic and agent presence features. WSMAN support is moving along, I recently found and added a way to automaticaly detect that an Intel AMT computer is in WSMAN only mode and connect to it correctly. WSMAN support is still weak, but improving.

For people looking at the Intel AMT DTK source code, many more changes. Intel AMT Commander's main form was starting to be way to big and so now all the right hand side panels and proken up into seperate files. The terminal was also broken up, a new VT100 user control is now avaialble to process serial-over-LAN on-screen display. This is very useful for developers that want to build their own VT100 terminal that looks different from Intel AMT Commander.

Certificate and TLS handling was improved thruout. First, many of the tools will now work better with mutual-authentication, this is especialy true for IAmtTerm.exe that did not do so well with mutual-auth before. Intel AMT Director's certificate handling is improved, you can now drag & drop a certificate on Director's certificate manager to import, added more certificate formats and Director can now issue certificates with many common names, just like Intel SCS does. Commander will also handle these certificates better than before.

All in all, this is a major new update to the Intel AMT DTK. I encorage people to keep sending bug reports, and thank everyone who already did.

Download: Intel AMT DTK v0.48x Audio Blog (.mp3)

Ylian

First off, happy new year to everyone. It's this time of year to reflect on 2007 and it certainly was a great year for the Intel AMT Developer Tool Kit (DTK) and all of Intel vPro Technology and Intel AMT. For one, the DTK has new been public on the Intel web site for about a year now and certainly getting better and better with every version.

In the last few weeks, we have received early prototypes of new upcoming Intel platforms and been working on them. I know many Intel partners read my blog and if you have access to early prototypes, make sure to ask your Intel representative for the latest version of the DTK designed to work with them.

I also worked quite a bit on improving the user interface for many aspects of the DTK. I generally think the UI improvements is absolutely impossible to finish, there is always more to do. For example, I am starting to add support for drag & drop where it makes sense, improving the UI at other places, etc.

For 2008, we will continue to improve the quality of the DTK tools, add a pile more features and keep trying to make things easier to use. I also expect to support more WSMAN, and I would like to get more time to work on Intel AMT Monitor since I think that's the next fun Intel AMT vPro tool in the works.

Ok, I will try to get a new public version of the DTK released soon.

Ylian
(Intel AMT Blog)