AMT Unprovision and Re-provision

[ramakj]

Hi,
We have a situation where some of our AMT systems have been configured with different username/passwords. i.e there's one set of credential per server stack. If we move systems between these stacks, our AMT functionality will stop working. We are looking for a way to detect this and autmoatically unprovision the system and then re-provision it. A few questions:
1. Is there a way to locally execute a tool on the system to un-provision AMT ? for ex. activator.exe or is it always needed to have a remote machine or remote server be available ?

2. We tried using unprovision amt utility from a remote server and unprovisioned it to SMB mode(which is what we use). We found after the unprovision, that when we try to re-provision using activator.exe, we get the following error:
================= Activator log =================

Starting log 02-05-2012 15:05:16 :

Host info:PPI00001-US-S2

UUID:03000200-0400-0500-0006-000700080009

Remote Configuration not Enabled

AMT Version:3.0.2

System is pre configured

System is in PSK mode

Please change MEBx password and/or set PID/PPS. This can be done via MEBx or using the USB option.

Exit with code 7 (Machine is missing preconfiguration information)

=======================================================================

The interesting part is that if we simply get into MeBIOS and do absolutely nothing but just log in and then exit and re-run activator.exe everything works just fine and the system gets re-configured. Any idea why this happens as we cannot really be doing this.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Regards,
Ram

[Gael_H_Intel]

Hi Ram,

You should be able to unconfigure using the configurator too (which I think used to be called the Activator...). I will need to check on the version requirements (AMT 3.x). It sounds like you are not doing a "full" unprovision, but instead a partial unprovision. The SCS tool should also support a full unprovision remotely for AMT 3 systems. I'll dig around and see what I can find.

[ramakj]

Hello Gael,

Thanks for the super quick response as usual. We are not using the full blown SCS. We use SCSLite which is used only to provision the systems. After provisinion we do not use SCSLite for anything but use other tools/utilities for controlling these systems remotely.

Activator.exe seems to want to talk to a remote system (probably SCS) to be able to do anything. Even if we provide it the detaisl of the SCSLite server, it still doesnt work.

The unprovision utility (run from a remote machine) works but it leaves the system in a state where we cannot automatically re-provision it without human intervention (i.e we have to simply log into the MEBx atleast once).

Regards,
Ram

[Gael_H_Intel]

I'll bet there is a power shell script that would work on an AMT 3 system. I'll need some time to check into this.

[Gael_H_Intel]

Your problem is kind of strange about having to go back into the MEBx. It almost sounds like what might be happening here:

http://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/showthread.php?t=55789&o=d&s=lr&wapkw=unprovision

If it's a firmware issue on an AMT 3.x system - I'm not sure what to tell you except to see if your OEM has a newer version of the firmware out there - but then you will need to touch your system to update that too.

Any local unprovisioning would require AMT 6.1 or newer - this is the version where they openned up the local interface so that means for an AMT 3 system, it's going to want to have it done remotely, like from the RCS.

You might try downloading the latest SCS and see if it work out ok for you.

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/download-the-latest-version-of-intel-amt-setup-and-configuration-service-scs/