MeshCentral & MeshCommander Blog

This week we got another batch of updates and improvements to MeshCentral and the MeshCentral Agent. I do want to thank the GitHub community for their help finding issues, feature suggestions and help with translations. This week the main announcement is the addition of self-installing binaries for many non-Windows platforms (Linux, macOS and BSD). Just like with Windows, MeshCentral can now generate on-the-fly a self-installing binary for many platforms that include server and account connection information and more. This is all thanks to Bryan Roe for agent improvement to make this possible. You can now download, execute and install the agent using only the binary. In detail:
Linux, macOS, BSD Self-installing Agent Binaries. MeshCentral supports many platforms, but in the past only the Windows had a self-installing agent binary. Now, this has been added to many other platforms that run graphical user interfaces. You can opt to download an agent for 64bit x86 Linux, MeshCentral will t…

As MeshCentral is increasingly popular as a self-hosted remote management solution, many may not realize that in addition to the hosting costs of running the server, hosting providers also change for traffic. In the case of Amazon AWS, inbound traffic is free but outbound traffic from the server is charged at $0.09 US per GB, the first GB being free. This means that even if you are using a 35$/mo instance to manage over 10k+ devices, the monthly costs of the network traffic can be significantly higher than server cost depending on usage.

With the latest published version of MeshCentral, many new features where added to help increase server speed, scalability and reduce hosting costs thru minification and compression. The sum of which can result in a significant reduction of hosting costs. This week, Bryan Roe added ZIP/DEFLATE support to the MeshAgent for compressed updates and traffic compression. In addition, the MeshCentral server now has addition support for traffic compression and…

In the last few weeks, we made many more improvements to the quality and security of MeshCentral. One area that is important when managing 100’s or 1000’s of computers with remote software agents that encounter many different situations is to get actionable data back when something happens. This week, MeshCentral got a new optional automated feature that turns on the MeshAgent crash dump feature and fetches crash dump files when needed. This along with many other improvements will keep improving software quality and reliability moving forward. In detail:
Automated Agent Crash Dump. Thanks to Bryan Roe, the MeshCentral agent has had the ability to generate a crash dump file on all platforms (Windows, Linux, BSD, macOS) when this feature was activated. With the most recent release of MeshCentral, this agent feature can now be activated from the server. In addition to this, if an agent crash dump file is present on a remote machine, MeshCentral can now automatically retrieve it. This will…

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…