Experimenting with IDE Redirect over the Internet

By Ylian Saint-hilaire (Intel) (91 posts) on March 6, 2007 at 10:27 pm

One of the most powerful features of Intel AMT is IDE redirect. If Intel AMT is a tool box for administrators, IDE-Redirect is the jack hammer. One of the raisons it's so powerful is that, in any situation, an administrator can reboot the machine on to a redirected disk, allowing the administrator to transport more tools to the machine. You got a virus? Reboot the machine into a recovery OS that will scan the computer and remove viruses, etc.

IDE redirect is implemented over a TCP connection, transporting each IDE call back and forth from the Intel AMT machine to the administrator console. It's like putting the network between the computer and the hard disk. This is all good if you have a fast network, but today, just for kicks, I tried booting a OS over the Internet using AMT IDE-R.

The console was attached to a fast cable modem, and the Intel AMT machine connected to a DSL modem (768k down / 256k up). The DSL was clearly the bandwidth limiter. I setup my home DSL router with a few port mappings and used the console application in the Intel Developer Tool Kit to try it out. I really recommend using TLS over the internet. As I mentioned in my previous blogs, I am going to make it really easy to setup TLS in upcoming versions of the DTK so, there will be no excuses and it's far more secure.

Now for the results: Over my Internet setup, booting a bare Microsoft DOS disk takes about a minute. Of that, about 30 seconds is spent going thru BIOS things, and 30 seconds loading the floppy disk image from IDE-R. Once I got the prompt thru serial-over-LAN, I could type "command.com" to load another instance (which is 98k in size) and it takes about 10 seconds.

Then, I tried Microsoft WinPE:  This is a smaller version of Microsoft Windows. Over a normal 100Mb/sec network it takes about 3 to 4 minutes to boot into a graphics environment and will have loaded about 80 megabytes of data from my ISO image on the console. Over my internet setup, it took about 40 minutes to load 60 megabytes at which point, the boot jammed. I only tried this once but it's consistent with what I have heard so far. Not sure why it jammed, the booting computer had a black screen with the mouse cursor frozen on it. Maybe another version of Microsoft WinPE would work better.

In any case, if anyone reading my blog knows of really good recovery OS's, both free or commercial, please drop a blog comment. I am certainly not alone in looking for more powerful boot images, images that work well with serial-over-LAN, and OS images that would work well over the internet.

Ylian

Categories: Manageability

Comments (7)

March 11, 2007 8:04 AM PDT


Ilia Bosis		 Thinking of a recovery OS, a compact, stripped-down version of Linux immediately came to mind.
A simple search on distrowatch.com bring these results:
http://distrowatch.com/search.php?category=Rescue&origin.....tus=Active
The most interesting are the SystemRescueCD: http://www.sysresccd.org/
and the Inside Security Rescue Toolkit (INSERT): http://www.inside-security.de/insert_en.html

Note, that all these Linuxes are include the GUI and are about 50Mb size.
March 12, 2007 1:43 AM PDT

Ylian Saint-hilaire (Intel)
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 I will have to look into these. One that I have been using a little is (http://www.911cd.net). It's not up to date, but does work with Serial-over-LAN nicely.
March 14, 2007 12:22 PM PDT


Karthik Veeramani		 Did you try BartPE?

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

Karthik.
March 14, 2007 3:27 PM PDT

Ylian Saint-hilaire (Intel)
Total Points:
6,253
Status Points:
6,253
Black Belt
 I have not tried BartPE myself, but I know others who have. I don't think it runs as well over serial-over-lan as Rescue911, but I will have to check.

Ylian
May 18, 2007 7:55 AM PDT


Maria		 Hi, just for tests I have used all Win XP and Win NT boot images from
http://www.allbootdisks.com
I have also been able to repair win XP Pro SP2 using IDE-R from a remote installer CD, it really took a while but it worked!!

Ma.
May 25, 2007 1:33 AM PDT


Yan		 it's easy to find dos-based diagnostic and recovery images, but it's difficult to find linux-based ones. I've tried the linux rescue cd including SystemRescueCD, INSERT, Finnix, RHEL5 recovery CD as mentioned above, all failed, no output in the console, and some images can't even boot with error message like "Key I/O error" or such so on. Maybe it's because the framebuffer driver is used for display and serial driver can't work with SOL. I think SOL should be greatly enhanced to become MOL(Monitor Over LAN).
May 26, 2008 12:45 AM PDT


Johan		 Hi Yilian. Thank you for making this test! I for one think this test could become part of the AMT developers official test criteria. Or at the very least there should be some declaration to say for example that AMT can use IDE-R reliably at XYZ network speeds (But maybe your attempt fail because of data corruption and not an OS constraint - only one way to find that out, which is a memory dump taken at an exact point of the boot and compare them. Which is why the AMT developers might be needed to make this possible). But if it is because of a time out in WinPE... Microsoft will have to come help I guess. :-)

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