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Disabled TCP/IP Interface... =[

idata
Employee
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I am summoning all the vPro Gods on this one. We initially ordered about 1500 vPro Enabled machines to

refresh our current environment. We are a major financial institution with approx 190 remote locations so

we felt that vPro would suit us great. When we initially received the machines, and the machines were imaged

and connected to the network, the HP 7800's would start sending hello packets and register HPSYSTEM in

DNS with the IP address it has. As we kind of put the cart before the horse, we did not have anything setup

to do the provisioning.

The HPSYSTEM DNS entries started goofing up functions in our software so we were advised to disable the

TCP/IP interface to stop the ME's from registering duplicate DNS entries. At the time, HP did not turn off the

Hello Packets by default until their later BIOS revision 1.26.

Long story short, we currently have all these machines that have the TCP/IP Interface disabled in the MEBx and

now looking for a solution to remotely enable the interface and kick off provisioning. My hope was that I would

be able to use the SCS Activator (formerly RCT), to do this but I am not seeing anything in the documentation

that confirms this.

We do not have SCCM SP1 set up in a production environment, but I do have a Proof of Concept lab by which

I can test something on.

Does any one have any idea's on how to do this? I'd rather not have to send out tech's to these locations to

enable them again.

Thanks a million!

-Johnny Cadavid

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Brian_Cockrell
Employee
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Johnny,

I need some information from you to determine next steps.

What BIOS version are you running on the HP7800's?

ME firmware version?

What specific setting did you "disable" to turn off the hello packets?

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idata
Employee
956 Views

Hi Brian,

The HP 7800's are getting updated with the 1.26 BIOS FW. The ME FW is shipping with 3.0.x, but we are

updating it to 3.2.1. I know they released 3.2.2, but I haven't tested with it. We have Dell 755's in the same

boat. With the Dell's, we are updating the BIOS to A11. The Dell BIOS update also includes the ME FW

and brings it up to 3.2.1. At the moment, Dell has not made a BIOS update with 3.2.2 included.

Because we are at a bit of a stand still, we haven't started with a production implementation. I do, however,

have a proof of concept lab that is self contained so we avoid issues with putting it on our production wire.

Right now, I have an SCCM SP1 Server in a VM that is set up to do provisioning. It's been tested and verified

on both the 7800's and the 755's.

The setting that was changed is Intel AMT Configuration>TCP/IP>Disable Network Interface>Y

Like I said earlier, we put the cart before the horse because we were waiting for SCCM SP1 to be able to do

the in band provisioning through the SCCM Client. Becuase there was a gap, we were not ready to do the

provisioning. Because the interfaces were enabled, they were creating duplicate DNS records and creating

problems with a major application.

I hope this helps.

-Johnny Cadavid

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Brian_Cockrell
Employee
956 Views

Johnny,

Great information on BIOS and ME FW versions. What specific setting in the ME did you change to "disabled"? Was it the ME state control or the manageability feature selection or something else?

Brian

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idata
Employee
956 Views

Brian,

I'm not sure if you missed it, but the menus that I used to get to the setting werei n this order:

Intel AMT Configuration> TCP/IP> Disable Network Interface> Y

All the other settings are left as default. We were primarily concerned with the bad DNS entries

flaring up. That really is the only change that I am concerned with.

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