Tools for interacting with Intel's Active Management Technology
AMT is a light weight hardware control interface put into some Intel based laptops and desktops as a tool for corporate fleets to manage hardware. It provides the basics of power control, as well as remote console via VNC. It functions by having a dedicated service processor sniff traffic off the network card on specific ports before it gets to the operating system. Some versions of Intel NUC boxes have AMT, which make them ideal candidates for building a reasonable cluster in your basement.
There was once a tool called amttool which let you interact with
these systems from Linux. This used the SOAP interface to AMT. That
was removed in v9 of the firmware, which means it no longer works with
modern AMT in the field.
The interface that remains is CIM, a standard from the DMTF that builds XML models for all the things. There exist very few examples for how to make this work on the internet, with one exception: the OpenStack Baremetal (Ironic) service. It has native support for AMT hardware control.
This project is derivative work from Ironic. The heavy lifting of understanding all the CIM magic incantations, and oh the magic they are, comes from that code. Refactored for a more minimal usage.
AMT is branded as vPro in products by Intel. It is found in many Intel based laptops. There are also specific models of Intel NUC that include vPro.
This code gets tested with 5i5MYHE NUCs as well as an older NUC
that I have laying around.
AMT must be enabled in the BIOS before it can be used externally. This
is done by pressing Ctrl-P during initial boot. Initial user /
pass is admin / admin. You will be required to create a new
admin password that has at least 1: number, capital letter, and non
alphanumeric symbol.
One you do that, reboot and you are on your way.
The amt library installs a binary amtctrl for working with AMT
enabled machines.
To simplify the control commands amtcrtl has a machine
registry. New machines are added via:
amtctrl add <name> <address> <amtpassword>
You can see a list of all machines with:
amtctrl list
And remove an existing machine with:
amtctrl rm <name>
Once machines are controlled you have a number of options exposed:
amtctrl <name> <command>
Command is one of:
- on - power on the machine
- off - power off the machine
- reboot - power cycle the machine
- pxeboot - set the machine to pxeboot the next time it reboots, and reboot the machine. This is extremely useful if you have install automation on pxeboot.
- status - return power status as an ugly CIM blob (TODO: make this better)
- More extensive in tree testing (there currently is very little of this)
- Retry http requests when they fail. AMT processors randomly drop
some connections, built in limited retry should be done.
- Fault handling. The current code is very optimistic. Hence, the 0.x nature.
- Remove console control. There are AMT commands to expose a VNC remote console on the box. Want to support those.