Does AMT make DHCP renewal requests when the Host OS is off

[IanB]

Does AMT make DHCP renewal requests when the Host OS is off?

We have our Win10 PCs provisioned for AMT. The clients are all set to use DHCP. We provision the clients with the acuconfig utility against a profile on our SCS server. We haven't changed anything IP related for AMT, so it uses the same IP as the Host OS.

What happens with renewal requests when the Host OS is switched off or asleep in this scenario? Will AMT lose connection when the lease expires and the IP reissued to another machine, or does it make a renewal request on its own behalf to keep the lease active? If so, how often does it make this request and is it configurable?

[JoseH_Intel]

Hello IanB,

Thank you for joining the community.

The DHCP lease is supposed to be active all the time in order for the system to be discoverable when Out Of Band. The Management Engine (ME) is supposed to renew the lease whenever it expires.

The following is taken from the AMT SDK Reference Guide: https://software.intel.com/sites/manageability/AMT_Implementation_and_Reference_Guide/WordDocuments/setipv4dhcpandstaticipaddressmodes.htm

•  Change Intel AMT to DHCP mode before changing the host configuration from static IP to dynamic IP. Otherwise, Intel AMT will not be able to detect the new IP address shared with the host.

•   If the host is already configured for dynamic IP when Intel AMT switches from static IP to DHCP, then the host DHCP lease must be refreshed so that Intel AMT can learn the host dynamic IP address. If the host DHCP lease is not refreshed then Intel AMT assumes that the host failed to configure its IP and will actively try to obtain its own DHCP lease. This may result in the host and Intel AMT having different leases from the DHCP server (depending on the specific DHCP server vendor and configuration).

I will look forward for your thoughts

Regards

Jose A.

Intel Customer Support

[JoseH_Intel]

Hello IanB,

I am just following up to double-check if you found the provided information useful. If you have further questions please don't hesitate to ask. If you consider the issue to be completed please let us know so we can proceed to mark this thread as closed. I will reach you back by a last time on next November 12th.

Regards

Jose A.

Intel Customer Support Technician

[IBrow1]

Hi Jose,

I'm not sure that really helps. We've got these already configured for DHCP but we're observing some strange behaviour. When switched off they're sending dhcp renewal requests to our DHCP server every 3 minutes or so. The server is renewing the lease, but three minutes later they're sending the request again.

That's why I'm trying to figure out what the expected behaviour is. I'm assuming it isn't to request a renewal every 3 minutes?

[JoseH_Intel]

Hello IanB,

Can you tell what version of SCS are you running? About your systems what AMT version are they running?

Regards

Jose A.

Intel Customer Support Technician

[IBrow1]

SCS is 12.0.0

AMT Clients are a mixed bag. 8's, 9's, 11's, 12's and some 14's. So far we've not spotted any correlation between the boards and the behaviour. Seems like they start doing it once we've provisioned them.

[JoseH_Intel]

Hello IanB,

Thanks for the info. There is a newer update of the SCS package verion 12.2.0.150 released about a month ago. I remember a similar issue present on an earlier version of SCS. Unfortunately don't have information about if this particular issue was solved on this latest release but I think it is worth to give it a try. You can download it from this URL: https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/26505/Intel-Setup-and-Configuration-Software-Intel-SCS-

Regards

Jose A.

Intel Customer Support Technician

[IBrow1]

Jose,

You're suggesting that a glitch on the SCS server is causing powered off machines to make DHCP requests every 3 minutes? It sounds unlikely, and I'm not seeing what would change that behaviour just by upgrading the server.

I think before I put in a change request and a couple of days work upgrading the service I'd need to see a release note that details the fix on that one.

Any other ideas?

[JoseH_Intel]

Hello IanB,

I think I misunderstood about the DHCP lease request was happening on the SCS server and not on the provisioned systems. So can you confirm this exact behavior of a DHCP lease request happens on every AMT system regardless of the installed ME version? Have you do any ME firmware upgrade to any of the systems?

Regards

Jose A.

Intel Customer Support Technician

[JoseH_Intel]

Hello IanB,

I am just following up to double check if you were able to gather the requested information. Otherwise let us know if you require more time to accomplish this.

Regards

Jose A.

Intel Customer Support Technician

[JoseH_Intel]

Hello IanB,

We will proceed to mark this thread as closed. If you have further issues or questions just go ahead and submit a new topic.

Regards

Jose A.

Intel Customer Support Technician