MeshCentral & MeshCommander Blog

Today, MeshCommander v0.8.6 was published with more features and bug fixes. By far the most important improvement to MeshCommander is its new internationalization support with, in addition to English, 9 new languages supported including Japanese and Simplified Chinese. This will help broaden the number of people that can make use of Intel® AMT in their native language. In addition to this, KVM session recoding is now built-into MeshCommander, a feature that was only available on MeshCentral in the past. In Detail:
Multi-language support. The Windows MSI installed version of MeshCommander now offers an additional menu to switch between 10 languages. Supported languages: Dutch, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, German, Chinese, Portuguese, Russian in addition to English. These are machine translations and since MeshCentral is open source, the community is very much encouraged to help improve the translations. The translation file is on GitHub here. The same format and tools used for Me…

This week we got a new feature that was called a “mini killer application” by a GitHub community member. Following the announcement that the noVNC web-based client was added to MeshCentral last week, we added a built-in web-based RDP client too. You can now RDP into a Windows computer from any modern web browser over the Internet. For Windows operating systems that support multiple RDP sessions, that is also supported allowing many users to log into a single server at the same time. In addition, this week we have MeshCentral Router now internationalized into many languages, additional customizations and a fun fact about MeshCentral downloads. In detail:
Built-in RDP client. The main new feature this week is the addition of a web-based RDP client to MeshCentral. This is thanks to the MSTSC.js and node-rdp.js open source projects which are the bases for this feature. Once activated in the MeshCentral configuration file, users can click on a device and click the “Web RDP” link to go to th…

This week we got one more bag full of new features that continue to improve the flexibility and depth of MeshCentral. We have a new built-in web-based Remote Frame Buffer (RFB) client called noVNC which allows administrators to make remote desktop connections to devices that support that protocol (notably macOS). We have new battery status, improvements with MeshCentral Router and a new way to configure an account for cross-domain user management. Let’s look at the details:
Built-in noVNC client. MeshCentral has its own built-in remote desktop protocol that is supported by the MeshAgent and MeshCentral, however in rare cases it’s more practical for administrators to use the Remote Frame Buffer (RFC6143) protocol to connect to a remote computer. This may be the case for macOS for example that has built-in support for this protocol. In the last few days, we added the open source noVNC web-based client to MeshCentral, making it easy for administrators to quickly click and connect to a rem…

As the MeshCentral community is growing, there are more complicated integration of MeshCentral into enterprise environments. One of the most essential of these integrations is Single Sign-On (SSO). Being able to have a centralized console to manage users, user credentials and user access to services is one of the most important services of any large organizations. This week, MeshCentral added capability to integrate with Microsoft Azure Active Directory (using OAuth2) and JumpCloud (using SAML). In addition, MeshCentral now has a generic SAML binding capability for any SAML capable credential provider, improved User’s Guide and better mobile web application. In detail:
Microsoft Azure Active Directory. MeshCentral now has built-in support for Azure Active Directory, a service often used by large corporation to manage user’s identity, credentials and access to web services. The updated MeshCentral User’s Guide now has a step-by-step guide into setting up MeshCentral for Azure Active Dir…

As MeshCentral is being integrated into various network environments, it’s becoming important that MeshCentral support Single Sign-On (SSO) with other services so that instead of users creating their own user accounts on MeshCentral, they leverage existing accounts. Last week, MeshCentral gained OAuth capability to allow for single sign-on integration into other services and has built-in support for Twitter, Google, GitHub and Reddit one-click sign in. In addition, this week MeshCentral got real-time session indication and improved Korean translation. In detail:
OAuth SSO support. Being able to integrate MeshCentral with other single sign-on providers makes it very convenient for users since they no longer need create an account on a MeshCentral server or remember passwords. Instead, they use their existing account and login directly. Last week NodeJS Password was integrated into MeshCentral for the first time allowing a large range of different authentication strategies including OAu…

The last weeks have been crazy with over 30k downloads of MeshCentral on NPM per week for each of the last two weeks. Along with this, plenty more features and improvements have been made. One area of improvement was session recording. MeshCentral is capable of recording user sessions on the server, but now the feature was improved, and browser side recording was also added. Bryan Roe added support for Deepin Linux, a Chinese based Linux distribution and improvements in device data gathering. In detail:
Improved server-side session recording. This feature is important for servers that need full auditing of remote-control sessions. In the latest MeshCentral the recording file includes more session metadata and for servers with session recording enabled, there is a new “Recordings” panel in the “My Users” section that can be viewed by administrators. You can quickly see what recordings are present on the server, the start and end time, duration and file size. You can then download the re…

This week, MeshCentral added an important new capability that has been requested by many users, the ability to multiplex a single remote desktop session to many browsers at once. In the past, if many different browsers would connect to see the same computer at the same time, the traffic was not efficient, and the slowest browser would drag everyone else down.  With the latest release of MeshCentral, there is a new option to enable a desktop multiplexor module that actively understands the remote desktop protocol and perform data caching and arbitration between the different viewers. Let’s look at the details:
Desktop tile caching. Once enabled, MeshCentral will cache all graphics data that is currently visible for the desktop session. It keeps an ordered list of what data is visible from oldest to newer and can replay the entire desktop when a new viewer joins the session. As new images come in, the server looks at what previous images are not longer visible and updates the list. When …