Do you know where your Intel® AMT systems are?

By Gael Holmes (Intel) (91 posts) on November 3, 2008 at 9:38 am

One of the questions we get quite often on our Manageability Forum is: "How do I programmaticly determine if a system on my network is Intel® AMT capable?" This is a very good question because we can't simply tell them to call some API that would return the answer (unless the system has AMT enabled, then in that case we know the answer.) The problem is, that if a system is in a network, but has Intel AMT capabilities, but for whatever reason Intel AMT has not been enabled or maybe they system was unprovisioned, it will not respond to any of the APIs that we could point them to.

The other check for determining AMT capable systems is to physically look at them (is there a vPro sticker on it? Does it have the right chipset and cpu id?) Unfortunately, we may want to test a system for AMT capabaleness while it is on the network somewhere, possibly miles away so a physicall check would be inconvenient, time consuming, and expensive if someone has to drive to another location to look at every system.

So how can this burden be eased a little bit? On the vPro Expert Center, there is a tool called iAMT Scan. This utility uses the MEINFO tool that is only available to OEMs, system builders - the guys who actually build firmware. MEINFO returns useful information such as AMT Version, driver releases, and whether or not a system is provisioned. When this Scan tool is run on the system in question, it writes all the information to the registry so that software can then retrieve it - this is very important for when we need to figure out which systems on the network are AMT capable or not. (note that you would have to push this down to every system and run it once before you run your network discovery.)

Intel® Software Network

Do you know where your Intel® AMT systems are?

By Gael Holmes (Intel) (91 posts) on November 3, 2008 at 9:38 am

Categories: Manageability

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