Intel Open Port: Intel vPro Expert Center Blog : Tags : guardpost

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

0 Comments 0 References Permalink Tags: amt, commander, director, outpost, guardpost, dtk

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