vPro AMT IP - various questions

[bmcgin]

I am setting up a Minisforum MS-01 for personal use.  VPro was a major factor in picking this particular computer.   vPro is new to me, and it does everything I had hoped (after working with IPMI for years.)

I am slowly understanding things and have not yet found the perfect setting.  When I setup with a single nic card and give the OS one dedicated IP and give AMT a different dedicated with the FQDN set to dedicated, it works.

However, when I look at my Netgear router, I see only one of the IPs.  Sometimes after rebooting the router, the OS IP will show and sometimes, the AMT IP will show.  Both IPs are reachable and everything works fine.  It's odd that the router switches between the two after being rebooted.

So to experiment, I tried using two nic cards and gave all three different IPs and this is working well too.  Is there a way to bind AMT to a particular nic card?  It looks like it is grabbing the nic with higher mac address.  I was trying to dedicate one nic for AMT, like IPMI does.  

The Netgear shows the OS IP addresses and never the AMT which I suppose may have something to do my router, Nighthawk RAXE500?  The goal is to label the IPs so to keep everything straight.

At this point, it looks like using a single NIC is just as good as using two?  I want the ability to boot when off.  I think I only need to specify different IPs for this, and using two nic cards is unnecessary.  

And I'm not sure what the difference is with the FQDN shared or dedicated.  

Sorry for the many questions.  I've been sorting through this all day.

[bmcgin]

It looks like the only way to boot from the MeshCommander is to use one nic, and two different IPs.  The nic needs to be the one with the higher mac address.   Using two NICs with three IPs, would not work.  

I think I know why the router was showing the OS IP and the AMT IP after multiple reboots.  I was setting the static IP in the router instead of only in the computer.   Which really does not make sense.  Possibly, the router saw the MAC and realized AMT was setting an IP, so it agreed, even though the router was supposed to set the OS IP.

So that answered a few questions.  vPro only binds to that one particular nic. 

In the grand scheme of things, this is great.  I've been using an old laptop, which went down over the weekend while I was away.  I was stuck!   So vPro, along with a smart-networked surge protector and setting Boot on Power in the bios, should fix things.   A Fingerbot would have also worked.  I was due for an upgrade.   I had no idea this was available for home computers.  This is great.