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I can't seem to find too many references online about out of band management in desktops. Does such a thing exist aside from Wake On LAN, etc?

atx
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    [Intel vPro](http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/vpro/vpro-technology-general.html)? – Michael Hampton Jul 28 '13 at 01:04
  • Hmmm, I'm looking for something more like DRAC that comes with it's own processor and uses something like PCI. – atx Jul 28 '13 at 01:29
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    You don't typically need that sort of "management" for desktops. – Michael Hampton Jul 28 '13 at 01:31
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    But why? What problem are you looking to solve with desktop out-of-band? – ewwhite Jul 28 '13 at 01:52
  • @ewwhite - I can see some applications. A friend of mine supports his sister's vet clinic in another state, a 6 hour drive away. He specifically selected machines w/ AMT to use as clients so that he could do bare-metal restores, if need be, w/o having to be on-site. (Thin clients weren't an option, per the vertical-market software vendor's requirements, otherwise that would probably have been the way he went. When you have lemons...) – Evan Anderson Jul 28 '13 at 02:27
  • If it is only power-reboot-poweroff functionality that you require, you could always hack together an arduino with some relays (or even MOSFETs if you want to go wild with it) and an Ethernet "shield". Of course this would not pass muster in a production environment, only in SOHO. – dlyk1988 Sep 04 '13 at 23:32

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Like @Michael Hampton says, Intel vPro, and specifically Active Management Technology (AMT), is probably your best solution. AMT is an out-of-band management tool based on an embedded system (microcontroller-based) built into the memory controller hub (see the architecture diagram, as well as lots of other helpful diagrams and tables, in this AMT FAQ) that optionally interacts with the host operating system through agents loaded in the OS (some of the out-of-band functionality needs no agents). There's a boatload of functionality in AMT-- and the DRAC-style remote console functionality you're talking about is in there. It's almost like a superset of IPMI (if you're familiar with that from server applications).

Evan Anderson
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    It's worth noting that DRAC is a real IPMI implementation, while vPro/AMT are not *really* IPMI. – Charles Jul 28 '13 at 08:18