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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>