The time has come to release a new version of the Intel AMT DTK v0.44. It was released publicly yesterday along with full source code. In this new version we again added many more improvements and bug fixes, but these are a few of the major highlights:

• Korean Translation. One more complete surprise from a fellow employee from Intel China who translated most of the DTK to Korean. As a result, the DTK installer keeps getting larger, but there is something really cool about Commander showing up on Korean. I also translated more of the DTK into French, especially Intel AMT Defender.
• Intel AMT Switchbox Controller. Added a new tools, it's not finished and so, it's only a preview, but it's basically a new interface for Intel AMT Switchbox. We have not updated the web UI for a while and so, we will do that too. This new controller tool subscribed to events, makes use of IAmtTerm, etc. to make it really easy to use Switchbox features.
• New WMI management infrastructure. This new version of the DTK improves the WMI query system. Intel AMT Outpost serial agent can receive WMI queries and answer them with a compressed response. Intel AMT Outpost can also make a set of queries and store the results into 3PDS. Intel AMT Commander can than use the same WMI management UI to make both interactive queries using SOL or view stored queries using 3PDS.
• Improved 3PDS support. Intel AMT Commander and Intel AMT Outpost have improved 3PDS support. The data viewer can now display HEX, UTF-8 or Images (JPEG, GIF, PNG...). You can also drop & drop a file right into a 3PDS data block and Commander or Outpost will save that file to the block. This is great for demonstrating 3PDS since you can drop and drop a picture in Outpost and view it in Commander.
• Intel AMT Outpost Kerberos support. Added Kerberos support to Intel AMT Outpost. That feature was already present in Intel AMT Commander for a while now. Also, Intel AMT Outpost will show connection warnings if connecting in TLS mode and the Intel AMT certificate is not correct.

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

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)