On Intel ME/AMT
I am spoiled with systems equipped with IPMI (which also limited my motherboard choices to few manufacturers), Intel ME/AMT offers just enough of IPMI functionality, so I don’t need to physically re-plug anything into those Dell boxes…(foreshadowing) But there are a few catches.
Instability – After a prolonged period (around a month or so), AMT seems to stop responding, either from its own port, or from MeshCentral. Shutdown / reboot will not fix this. The only way to bring AMT back online is to re-plug the power adapter.
AMT on weird video resolution – As I operate those boxes headless, the KVM session sometimes just misbehaves. Solution: a few of those HDMI dummy plugs to trick them as if it’s connected to a display.
AMT stuck on 10Mbps – This happens when I establish AMT desktop before I boot the device, it will stuck at 10Mbps forever. This is absymal when we are downloading the ISO file. Solution – I put my PXE grub boot time a bit longer, so the box will get to 1Gbps first, then AMT desktop.
10Mbps is two orders of magnitude slower.
This is how fast it should be on 1Gbps.
On TinyMiniMicro
Those micro form factor boxes are nice! On older versions, I got i7-6700T, SATA SSD disk, 2x8G DDR4. It probably can go all the way to 2x32G DDR4, and use NVMe instead of SATA. But even with the mediocre spec, The Ubuntu 24.04 autoinstall takes only 5 minutes. The supply of those is cheap (around $100 as of 2025) and plenty as these boxes are used in mass deployments and it’s everywhere – from eBay to Goodwill. Few things I wish it could be better:
Power adapter – it uses mostly standard laptop barrel plug (with the exception of Lenovo), on 19V, and the power adapter brick is half the size of the machine… not the end of the world, but I wish it could be powered by USB PD (there are some “PD activator” to barrel plug converter on Amazon, but I haven’t tried those yet).
Expand-ability – obviously on those Micro form factors, there’s no chance I can put in a half size GPU or some other things in there. It is plain compute, storage, memory, anything more will require a huge increase in footprint, which is also available all over the place at similar price tag.
Cost of upgrade – the extra hardware (such as 32G RAM + cheapest PCIe 3 SSD) easily surpasses the cost of the box. Which makes these upgrades questionable, say, each box takes another $150 to upgrade, total cost of a 4 node would be around $1000, which you could get almost 3 Intel gen 11 framework homeserver kits that easily outperforms those old boxes in every category.