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	1	.TH amt-howto 7 "(c) 2007 Gerd Hoffmann"
	2	.SH SYNOPSIS
	3	Intel AMT with linux mini howto
	4	.SH DESCRIPTION
	5
	6	.SS What is AMT and why I should care?
	7	AMT stands for "Active Management Technology". It provides some
	8	remote management facilities. They are handled by the hardware and
	9	firmware, thus they work independant from the operation system.
	10	Means: It works before Linux bootet up to the point where it activated
	11	the network interface. It works even when your most recent test
	12	kernel deadlocked the machine. Which makes it quite useful for
	13	development machines ...
	14	.P
	15	Intel AMT is part of the vPro Platform. Recent intel-chipset based
	16	business machines should have it. My fairly new Intel SDV machine has
	17	it too.
	18
	19	.SS Documentation
	20	Look here for documentation beyond this mini howto:
	21	.br
	22	http://www.intel.com/technology/platform-technology/intel-amt/engage.htm
	23	.br
	24	Most useful to get started: "Intel AMT Deployment and Reference Guide"
	25
	26	.SS Very short AMT enabling instructions.
	27	.TP
	28	Enter BIOS Setup.
	29	* Enable AMT
	30	.TP
	31	Enter ME (Management Extention) Setup. Ctrl-P hotkey works for me.
	32	* Login, factory default password is "admin".
	33	.br
	34	* Change password. Trivial ones don't work, must include upper-
	35	and lowercase letters, digits, special characters.
	36	.br
	37	* Enable AMT Managment.
	38	.TP
	39	Reboot, Enter ME Setup again with AMT enabled.
	40	* Configure AMT (hostname, network config, ...)
	41	.br
	42	* Use SMB (Small Business) management mode. The other one
	43	(Enterprise) requires Active Directory Service Infrastructure,
	44	you don't want that, at least not for your first steps ...
	45
	46	.SS Testing AMT
	47	Take your browser, point it to http://machine:16992/. If you
	48	configured AMT to use DHCP (which is the default) the OS and the
	49	management stack share the same IP address.
	50	.P
	51	You must do that from a remote host as the NIC intercepts network
	52	packets for AMT, thus it doesn't work from the local machine as the
	53	packets never pass the NIC then. If everything is fine you'll see a
	54	greeting page with a button for login.
	55	.P
	56	You can login now, using "admin" as username and the password
	57	configured during setup. You'll see some pages with informations
	58	about the machine. You can also change AMT settings here.
	59
	60	.SS Control Machine
	61	You might have noticed already while browing the pages: There is a
	62	"Remote Control" page. You can remotely reset and powercycle the
	63	machine there, thus recover the machine after booting a b0rken kernel,
	64	without having someone walk over to the machine and hit the reset
	65	button.
	66
	67	.SS Serial-over-LAN (SOL) console
	68	AMT also provides a virtual serial port which can be accessed via
	69	network. That gives you a serial console without a serial cable to
	70	another machine.
	71	.P
	72	If you have activated AMT and SOL the linux kernel should see an
	73	additional serial port, like this on my machine:
	74	.P
	75	.nf
	76	[root@xeni ~]# dmesg \| grep ttyS2
	77	0000:00:03.3: ttyS2 at I/O 0xe000 (irq = 169) is a 16550A
	78	.fi
	79	.P
	80	Edit initab, add a line like this:
	81	.P
	82	.nf
	83	S2:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty ttyS2 115200 vt100-nav
	84	.fi
	85	.P
	86	You should add the serial port to /etc/securetty too so you are able
	87	to login as root. Reload inittab ("init q"). Use amtterm to connect.
	88	Tap enter. You should see a login prompt now and be able to login.
	89	.P
	90	You can also use that device as console for the linux kernel, using
	91	the usual "console=ttyS2,115200" kernel command line argument, so you
	92	see the boot messages (and kernel Oopses, if any).
	93	.P
	94	You can tell grub to use that serial device, so you can pick a working
	95	kernel for the next boot. Usual commands from the grub manual, except
	96	that you need "--port=0xe000" instead of "--unit=0" due to the
	97	non-standard I/O port for the serial line (my machine, yours might use
	98	another port, check linux kernel boot messages).
	99	.P
	100	The magic command for the Xen kernel is "com1=115200,8n1,0xe000,0"
	101	(again, you might have to replace the I/O port). The final '0'
	102	disables the IRQ, otherwise the Xen kernel hangs at boot after
	103	enabling interrupts.
	104
	105	.SS Fun with Xen and AMT
	106	The AMT network stack seems to become slightly confused when running
	107	on a Xen host in DHCP mode. Everything works fine as long as only
	108	Dom0 runs. But if one starts a guest OS (with bridged networking) AMT
	109	suddenly changes the IP address to the one the guest aquired via DHCP.
	110	.P
	111	It is probably a good idea to assign a separate static IP address to
	112	AMT then. I didn't manage to switch my machine from DHCP to static IP
	113	yet though, the BIOS refuses to accept the settings. The error
	114	message doesn't indicate why.
	115
	116	.SS More fun with AMT
	117	You might want to download the DTK (Developer Toolkit, source code is
	118	available too) and play with it. The .exe is a self-extracting rar
	119	archive and can be unpacked on linux using the unrar utility. The
	120	Switchbox comes with a linux binary (additionally to the Windows
	121	stuff). The GUI tools are written in C#. Trying to make them fly
	122	with mono didn't work for me though (mono version 1.2.3 as shipped
	123	with Fedora 7).
	124
	125	.SH SEE ALSO
	126	amtterm(1), gamt(1), amttool(1)
	127	.P
	128	http://www.intel.com/technology/platform-technology/intel-amt/
	129	.SH WRITTEN BY
	130	Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@redhat.com>