Using Intel AMT Power Management @ Home

I write most of my blog posts at home in the evenings. Usually when I find a new tool I install these first within a virtual machine, this to not mess our family PC or my laptop I use for work. All Virtual Machines run on a HP dc7800 desktop which has Intel vPro support. This PC is installed down in the cellar. To avoid having to go down there to power on  the PC I have created two batch files that allow me to power up and power down the machine remotely using the Intel AMT power management feature.

I have configured AMT in SMB mode as described in the “vPro Setup and Configuration for the dc7800p Business PC with Intel vPro Processor Technology” whitepaper.

The utility I use is called RemoteControl.exe that is included within the Intel AMT Software Development Kit. The RemoteControl.exe and StatusStrings.dll can be found in the .\Intel(R) AMT 5.1 SDK Gold\Windows\Intel_AMT\Bin\ folder.

The command used in the PowerUp.cmd file is as following:

remotecontrol -r -user remoteu -pass P@ssword123 http://192.168.1.73:16992/RemoteControlService < powerup.txt

The command used in the PowerDown.cmd is as following:

remotecontrol -r -user remoteu -pass P@ssword123 http://192.168.1.73:16992/RemoteControlService < powerdown.txt

Note that at the end of the command I pipe the input RemoteControl.exe requires with a text file. The powerup.txt has the following content:

17
343
-1
-1
-1
-1

The powerdown.txt has the following content:

18
343
-1
-1
-1
-1

The first number actually defines what power function is being executed. the following functions are available:

16 (Reset)
17 (PowerUp)
18 (PowerDown)
19 (PowerCycleReset)
33 (SetBootOptions)

Finally, if you do not want to use batch files, you can also access the system remote power management features through the remote management web site. http://<system IP address>:16992