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Using the new Intel Net Traffic tool, part of the Intel AMT DTK

By Ylian Saint-hilaire (Intel) (91 posts) on April 19, 2007 at 9:50 pm

Starting with the Intel AMT DTK v0.27, a new Intel Net Traffic tool was added to the package to help demonstrate an interesting and often overlooked feature of Intel AMT -- rate limiting network filters. The new tool looks a little like the already available Intel Net Status tool.

Intel Net Traffic can be used to send UDP packets of a certain size to a target IP address at a certain rate, from one to 20 packets per seconds. It can also receive incoming packets and show them as being received on the receive progress bar. In a usual setup, you would install Intel Net Traffic on two computers, one of them being an Intel AMT computer. Say you go on the computer that supports Intel AMT and activate Net Traffic with the target IP address of the other computer and start ending 20 packets per seconds. The other computer starts reporting the received packets.

Now, using Intel AMT Commander on a different computer, we can add a traffic rating filter that limit the rate of all outgoing packets to 5 packets per seconds. Once active, you will immediately notice that Net Traffic is still sending 20 packets per seconds, but the receiving Net Traffic only gets 5 per seconds.

To add such a filter, go in Intel AMT Commander, connect to the Intel AMT computer and add a new network filter. Make the filter type "Ethernet", "Transmit", "Rate Limit", "5 Packets / sec" and "Internet IPv4" as frame type. Add this filter to a new policy and activate the policy. That's it. You now have limited the computer to only 5 outgoing packets per seconds. You can also create a rate limit filter for incoming packets and create a policy that includes both filters. You can also create rate limiting filters that apply to only certain types of packets, such as ICMP ping packets, etc.

One other fun thing to do is to cause a network event to be triggered when a rate limiting filter is applied. This is useful for monitoring consoles that want to know when a rate limiting filter may have been triggered by rogue software.

People using the Intel AMT DTK to create demonstration of the capabilities of Intel AMT will like this small demonstration of how Intel AMT can be used not only as a hardware firewall, but also as a way to limit traffic and detect problems.

Ylian

Categories: Manageability

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