Posts

MeshCentral - Intel AMT Super MPS & Manager

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In the past two weeks MeshCentral got a lot of infrastructure improvements for handling Intel® AMT. For anyone that is familiar with this technology, there are many ways to communicate with Intel® AMT and supporting them all using a clean design is difficult. This is exactly what MeshCentral now accomplishes with it’s new Super MPS and AMT Manager modules and use and a new ultra-configurable server-side WSMAN stack. The result is a beautiful design and leads seamless Intel® AMT usages. In detail:
Super MPS. MeshCentral how has an improved Management Presence Server (MPS) that can receive tunneling connections from both TCP/TLS and WebSocket and can handle many connections targeting the same device. Since each Intel® AMT device can only connect CIRA once, why would this matter? The CIRA protocol is a great tunneling protocol for LMS and future relay software. This allowed MeshCentral to reach Intel AMT in many ways while keeping a simple and clean design.MeshAgent CIRA client. Thanks to…
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MeshCentral - MeshCentral Assistant Tray Icon Tool

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This week we have an exciting new experimental tool for MeshCentral called the “MeshCentral Assistant”. This is a Windows tray icon tool that runs alongside the MeshAgent and will monitor and report in real time the state of the agent, what remote sessions are active, the state of Intel AMT and allows the users to request help. To try this tool, administrators must first update to MeshCentral v0.6.61. Let’s look at the features of this new tool:
MeshAgent monitoring. The tray icon tool will monitor the state of the agent and report if that Windows service is running and if the agent is connected to the MeshCentral server. MeshCentral assistant can obtain this information because the MeshAgent has a new named pipe communication channel can be used on the local platform to get live state changes from the agent. The tool does not poll the agent, instead the pipe is connected, and the agent will send events when anything changes.Request help. Users can now request help thru the new applica…
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MeshCentral - Access rights, Remote exec, Recordings, MyServer, User Consent

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There is so much to announce this week, I must send the announcement right away before it gets too big. One of the important features of MeshCentral that is often overlooked is its fine grain access control. You can delegate to a user an exact set of permissions to an exact set of devices. To do this, there is a complex system to determine what rights a user has on each device. This week, we added two more access control rights to make granting user permissions even more precise. This is just one of many new features. In detail:
New “Remote Command” and “Reset/Off” access rights. Previously, you could ask the mesh agent to remotely execute a command or power off a computer if the user had the “Remote Control” permission. These operations are now their own access right that must be given to a user separately. This is the result of a request made by a GitHub community member and allows a user to be given, for example, the right to remotely run commands without remote desktop access.Impro…
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MeshCentral - Router Improvements, Agent Tags, Rock64, Crash Dumps

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This week plenty more improvements and new features. The focus has been on MeshCentral Router, a Windows native tool that allows TCP/UDP port mappings, remote desktop and now, remote file management. I also purchased a Rock64 computer and tested MeshCentral on it resulting in a Tweet that got a lot of likes from the community. On top of it all, we have a new agent crash web page for developers, new agent tag parsing and a new automated build system on Linux. In detail:
MeshCentral Router Improvements. MeshCentral Router got a lot of improvements in the last week. Because it’s a native Windows tool, it does not have the limitations of the browser sandbox and so, can integrate better with the local OS. Here are some of the improvements:Remote File Manager. There is now a built-in file manager. You can right click on a device and open a local/remote file window that allows quick navigation of the file system on the remote computer and quick upload/download of many files at once. The file …
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MeshCentral - Agent on Router, Linux Installer, WebDAV Backups, Desktop Sharing

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This week Bryan extended the reach of MeshCentral by releasing a new MeshAgent for OpenWRT MIPS routers. This allows MeshCentral to manage a completely new class of routers and allow web-based access to these devices from anywhere in the world. Having a MeshAgent running within a router allows for an always-on jumping off point for remote access to other devices on the home or office network. We also improved the auto-backup feature and more. In detail:
MeshAgent on MIPS OpenWRT. OpenWRT is an open source router firmware and this last week, Bryan used the fact that the MeshAgent is super portable to compile it for OpenWRT. Specifically, we tested the agent on the Gl.iNet AG-750 which is a compact travel router that comes with OpenWRT built-in along with the ability to place a MicroSD card for extra storage. The result is that it’s now possible to install the MeshAgent on a home or office router and use that device as primary access to the rest of the network with MeshCentral’s TCP/UDP …
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MeshCentral - New Style, Remote Zip, Multi-Language Events

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Strangely this week, all major MeshCentral improvements have not been requested by the community, instead they are all things that I had on my “todo” list for a long time. One pleasant surprise was that one of these changes generated the most positive feedbacks on Twitter ever. This week the big new thing is the new optional styling for the MeshCentral login page and some of the sub-pages. In detail:
New Login Page Style. I have seen some complains that the MeshCentral login page was a bit “dated” and so as of this week, there is a new login page style that looks more modern. You can switch the style in the config.json and the new pages fully support all the existing languages and features including 2FA using time tokens, SMS, email and more. Some of the other sub-pages like the public file sharing page and 404 page also get the new style. In the coming weeks, the new styling will be switched to be the default style, however anyone can select the style they want.New Page Style Customiz…
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MeshCentral - Google Backup, Auditor, Notifications, Streaming

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This week the feature steamroller kept moving forward as more versions of MeshCentral are rapidly released with the community’s help. As usual, more bug fixes where made. This week, the focus was on making it easier for MeshCentral installations to comply with proper administrative procedures, notably, automated off-side backups and server auditing. The big addition was automated backup’s to Google Drive making MeshCentral installations more robust than ever. In detail:
Google Drive Automated Backups. As many administrators know, when running a cloud server like MeshCentral, it’s important to not only make regular server backup’s, but also keep the backups off-site. The latest version of MeshCentral makes this easy by offering built-in support for uploading server backup’s to Google Drive. MeshCentral already creates daily encrypted backups, but now, you can setup a trusted link to a Google account using OAuth and MeshCentral will upload and automatically manage backup’s in the Google …
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