MeshCentral & MeshCommander Blog

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 …

With the latest version of MeshCentral v0.5.13, there is now built-in integration for outbound SMS text messaging services Plivo and Twilio allowing MeshCentral to verify the phone number of a user and then use this number to send 2FA login messages and other notifications. This brings MeshCentral to an all new level. Plivo and Twilio are among other things, SMS gateway services that allow servers like MeshCentral to send SMS messages worldwide using REST API calls. You must first setup an account (Free trial accounts are available), you then configure your application identifier and key along with outgoing phone number (you need to get a phone number from the service you are using). Once setup, MeshCentral can send SMS messages. Let’s look at a few details:
SMS Gateway Setup. It takes a few minutes to get a trial account with limited features from one of the supported service providers. Place your ID and Key in MeshCentral’s configuration and you are ready to go. Don’t forget that the…

More work went on this week to improve MeshCentral’s usability mostly as a result of requests by the GitHub community. One noticeable change this week was the MeshCentral version numbers changed from 1.2.3-a format to just 1.2.3 making the version numbers much simpler and compatible with Semantic Versioning (semver.org). MeshCentral’s upgrade system now supports both “latest” and “stable” versions. This on top of many more user interface improvements, improved night mode and a new email verification login screen. Let’s look at all this in detail:
Semantic versioning and new “stable” releases. The MeshCentral self-updating system was itself upgraded this week with the change in versioning and the addition of the “stable” tag in NPM. In the past, administrators could only update to the latest version of MeshCentral, but now, you can wait and only upgrade to the latest stable version. This new system allows the community to test a new version before it’s marked as stable.User interface im…