MeshCentral & MeshCommander Blog

This week marked a milestone as on August 11th MeshCentral passed the half a million download count according to npm-stat.com. MeshCentral had its first commit on GitHub on August 28, 2017 and so, we crossed this milestone in about 2 years. While the downloads don’t correspond to the number of installed servers or users, it’s still a big number. I would like to thank everyone that participates in the community to make MeshCentral a success. To celebrate this event, some in my management are getting MeshCentral commemorative mugs (picture below).

As MeshCentral is increasingly taking on enterprise level features, this week we are announcing a Remote management session recording support. This is often a requirement in order to deploy management solutions. The MeshCentral Management Presence Server (MPS) is now capable of recording Intel® AMT KVM sessions for later playback in addition to remote desktop and terminal sessions to the software agent. This feature is really 3 announcements i…

Progress has been relentless thanks in part to the encouragements from the GitHub community. In the past few weeks we continued to focus on user requested features as the NPM download rate sometime exceeds 10k downloads a week. In addition to fixing many bugs, we added a bunch of new features this week and published a new MeshAgent for Windows (32 and 64bit) thanks for many improvements from Bryan Roe. Here are just some of the highlights:
MeshCtrl. As MeshCentral is integrated into various existing software ecosystems, it’s important make MeshCentral integrate well and responsive to other software actors. Administrators may want to automatically create and remove user accounts, automate the creation of device groups and get information on existing device states to feed this data into other software. To enable this MeshCentral now includes MeshCtrl, a command line tool that allows administrative operations on MeshCentral servers. MeshCtrl comes built into MeshCentral when you install t…

MeshCentral is an open source web based remote computer management web site that supports Intel® Active Management Technology (Intel AMT). In the past few weeks a lots of new features and bug fixes have been made. Mesh Agent improvements are thanks for Bryan Roe and many of the other features and fixes are thanks to the help of the GitHub community. There are too many changes to list here, however here is a selection of a few of the more interesting ones:
Support for FreeBSD and Puppy Linux. Bryan Roe has continued to port the MeshAgent into more Linux variants with support for Puppy Linux, a Linux distribution that is small and easy to use. More impressive still, this week Bryan got the MeshAgent installing, running and self-update on FreeBSD. This is the first time that MeshCentral works on BSD and certainly an interesting addition to the list of supported operating systems.Improved account creation and invitation email. Requested by the GitHub community, this feature allows an admin…

MeshCommander is an open source, web based Intel AMT management console that can be used as a stand-alone tool, loaded inside the Intel AMT firmware or as part of MeshCentral, the remote management web site. Over the last few weeks we made many improvements to MeshCommander and v0.7.8 just got published online. In this version, the stand-alone MeshCommander for Windows no longer uses IMRSDK.dll to perform IDER operations, instead all versions of MeshCommander now use the JavaScript IDER module. In addition to this, many more improvements and fixes have been made. In detail:
Improved IDER. Because of the new JavaScript IDER module, the stand-alone Windows version of MeshCommander now shows a “heat map” of disk reads in real time. This was available on other versions of MeshCommander (Firmware/NPM/MeshCMD), but it’s now on all versions.Drag & Drop IDER. Starting an IDER session to a remote computer is now as simple as dragging & dropping a .img or .iso or both file types on MeshC…

MeshCentral is an open source web based remote computer management web site that supports Intel® Active Management Technology (Intel AMT). This week, we added many more improvements to support Intel AMT activation in many different situations on both Windows and Linux operating systems. Intel AMT is an important part of being able to fully remotely manage a computer no matter the state of the operating system and today it’s getting even better with this new Intel AMT activation “super option”.

When a computer is first purchased, Intel AMT needs to be activated. There are two ways to activate Intel AMT: In Client Control Modes (CCM) and Admin Control Mode (ACM). CCM is simple but offers limited remote management options, while ACM requires a more complex activation flow but offers more management features. MeshCentral now supports activation in both these modes, with ACM activation requiring a trusted certificate from a certificate authority.

In addition to ACM and CCM modes, MeshCentr…

In the last few months MeshCentral usage has been increasing a lot with increased activity on GitHub. Last week, Bryan Roe released the latest MeshAgent2 with many bug fixes and new features. This new agent is a major improvement over the previous one in terms of stability, but there is one feature in particular that is especially interesting.

One of the most requested features that was missing so far was user consent request. That is, when an administrator wants to take control over a remote computer, a pop-up prompt is displayed asking the remote user to confirm that this administrator is allowed to access the computer. In some cases, this is a very important feature in order to meet privacy and security policies. Since MeshCentral can be used in wildly different situations, the user consent system is configurable per device group. User consent can be used for remote desktop, terminal and remote file access and can be used along with the user notification feature.

Because MeshCentral …

MeshCentral is an open source web based remote computer management web site and in the past few weeks it’s been improving a lot. The enthusiasm within the GitHub community for MeshCentral has been growing and I would like to thank everyone who participates and thanks for the bug reports and suggestions, MeshCentral getting a lot better because of it. Since my last blog a lot has been going on. I am going to select some of the highlights and present them here.
Public agent installation invitation link. In the latest version of MeshCentral, the administrator can now create a time limited invitation link. Administrators then send the link to users who get instructions on how to install the MeshCentral agent . This makes is a lot easier to provide remote support which is the main usage that this new feature is intended for. If someone asks for help, you can just send the link and once the user installs the agent, you can remote into the computer and fix issues. To get started with this fea…