MeshCentral & MeshCommander Blog

Plenty more work has been done over the last two weeks continually improving MeshCentral. This week, the new features where a bit all over the place as Bryan Roe released a new MeshAgent for all platforms (Windows, Linux, MacOS and FreeBSD) and the server saw some more bug fixing and various new features requested by the community. Here are some of the notable improvements this week:
Remote mouse cursor now visible on most Linux distributions. In the past few weeks, Bryan had built support for seeing the remote mouse cursor when it’s moved by the remote user on Windows only. Now, this support was extended to most Linux distributions. This feature is important when the remote user wants to show or point out something using the mouse. This feature was difficult to implement on Linux as there are many variations within different Linux distributions.Multi-language emails. MeshCentral can now send email messages in many different languages using a completely new email template system that i…

This week a major new update to MeshCentral was published with a single big feature that caused a lot code changes all over the project. Because of this, community testing and feedback is very much appreciated. The big feature is that you can now assign user permissions for individual devices instead of an entire device group. In the past, you created a device group and assigned user rights to that device group. This did not allow individual devices to be singled out. Users have been working about this limitation by creating many different device groups with different user permissions and moving devices between groups. This was far from ideal.

Anytime you change the access control system, it’s a big deal as your changing a lot of code. In addition, with this new release a user can be given access to a single device but not the group that this device belongs to. So, the web application needs to deal with how to display this device. A new “Individual Devices” header will now show up whe…

This week there is plenty more to talk about with many more releases, bug fixes and new features. Probably the two biggest topics of the week are the improved MeshCentral Router and improves internalization with more languages and translation tools.
Improved MeshCentral Router. MeshCentral Router is a TCP/UDP port mapping tool that allows applications like RDP and SSH to be directed thru the MeshCentral server. This tool allows , for example, quick access to your remote Windows devices using RDP. This week MeshCentral Router got a lot of improvements including a new devices panel that shows all devices in real-time including connection status and allows you to start an RDP session with a single click. Also added was email two-factor authentication support and better support for non-standard ports.Added languages. This week, MeshCentral got added machine translations for Korean, Hindi and Simplified Chinese. While the quality of the translation is low, it’s a starting point for communit…

This week we got a stack bug fixes and improvements. This last month has been focused on a lot of bug fixing from the community, but we also added a few more feature. In details:
Improved Let’s Encrypt support. Starting with v0.5.0, MeshCentral as transitioned from using GreenLock for Let’s Encrypt support to ACME-Client. As a result, if you are using Let’s Encrypt now and update to the latest MeshCentral, the server will come back to the un-signed certificate for a few minutes as it’s requesting a new TLS certificate using the new library. The new code allows NodeJS v8.0+ to support Let’s Encrypt (In the past NodeJS 10.12 was required) and there are new commands in the “My Server” / “Console” tab to check Let’s Encrypt status. The new code is also much smaller and should be much more robust than the old one. See picture below for the new commands (LE, LECHECK, LEEVENTS).Remote Mouse Cursor on Windows. When remotely controlling a computer, it’s sometimes possible for the remote user to…

MeshCommander is an open source Intel® Active Management Technology (Intel® AMT) management console tool. Version 0.8.1 just got released with much to talk about. MeshCommander has had many minor releases since v0.8.0 to fix various issues, but in v0.8.1 there is a new “Quick TLS” feature that allows users to setup Intel AMT with TLS and switch to a more secure connection in only two mouse clicks. Even more significantly, MeshCommander is now on GitHub making it possible for the community to track changes and contribute with feedback, bug reports and pull requests. In detail:

- Quick TLS. Using Intel AMT without a secure connection may be ok in some cases (some private network and VPN situations), however for most use cases, it’s not ideal. In the past, setting up Intel AMT with TLS required various tools, a certificate authority and enough knowledge of Intel AMT.  With MeshCommander v0.8.1, you can now setup TLS with just two clicks. When connecting to Intel AMT without TLS, a red ind…

This week, many more improvements and features where added to MeshCentral, most notably a big improvement on an important feature: the remote desktop recording system. In order to conform to auditing policies, some administrators must be able to record remote desktop sessions that are carried out by technicians. Because of the protocol, it was not possible to skip to any location in the file until today. This and many other improvements this week in detail:
Recorded Remote Desktop Indexing. Many months ago, MeshCentral was released with support for session recording. It works by recording the network traffic and adding timestamps and direction flags when writing the stream to a file. Because remote desktop only sends portions on the screen that change, it was not possible to skip forward into a remote desktop session using the MeshCentral Player. This week, we fixed this with a new indexing feature. MeshCentral can now create an index each 10 seconds of the location in the file and all…

It’s been a while since the last blog post and MeshCentral continues to evolve with multiple new releases on most business days. In this post, we got a bunch more new features including some more crazy ones. Probably the most important is the ability for the MeshAgent to be installed within a Docker container. Using this new feature, you can now manage your Docker container just like any other device remotely using MeshCentral. The Linux install script will automatically detect it’s being installed within Docker and adjust accordingly. Many more new features in detail:
MeshAgent within a Docker container. This is probably one of the more crazy features that has been published in a while. Normally on Linux, the MeshAgent will install itself so it can auto-start using Systemd or Initd, but these services don’t exist within a Docker container and so, the latest version of the Linux install script will auto-detect this situation and install the agent correctly within Docker. As a result, M…