MeshCentral Blog

MeshCentral is an open source web based remote computer management web site. As the software matures, people as increasingly been asking for features that enable remote support usages. For example, having the agent run only temporarily or being able to chat with a user on a remote computer. In the last few months, MeshCentral has gained some of these features including remote text chat. This week, we are doubling down and adding audio, video and file transfer support to the MeshCentral messenger application. Modern browsers have WebRTC for video conferencing and MeshCentral2 is now taking full advantage of this. First, when you establish a chat session, the browser will try to switch to using WebRTC to setup a direct path between the two browsers. If this is successful, all chat messages and file transfers are will go directly between the browsers, skipping the server. This reduces the server traffic, improves server scaling and lowers hosting costs. In addition, once the WebRTC dir...

MeshCentral is an open source web based remote computer management web site. One of the interesting advantages of MeshCentral version 2 is that the server is written entirely in NodeJS and so, can run on many operating systems, including Linux. In addition, it can run very efficiently on tiny appliance devices with limited, CPU and RAM. For example, you can load it on a ASUS Tinker Board , a Latte Panda , a Raspberry Pi or any of such devices. Once installed, it can easily manage 100’s of devices on a local network including remote management thru Intel® AMT when available. You can often install very light operating systems on these appliances that don’t run X Windows, freeing a lot of storage space and RAM. The appliance form factor is perfect for an always on server that you can keep attached to a network router. Some of these boards can run using Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) so, only one cable needs to be plugged in. Once you have a device, get started using our MeshCentral Instal...

MeshCentral can manage a wide range of Windows and Linux computers. This week, we added initial support for Apple MacOS. Once you update to the latest MeshCentral, you will have the option to download and install the MeshAgent for Apple MacOS. In addition, we improved support for reverse proxies, added the first version of MeshMessenger, added Ubuntu 18.04 support and introduced a new built-in chat application. In details: Apple MacOS support. Supporting a new operating system is a lot of work. It’s especially difficult when the MeshAgent is trying to act as a remote desktop server and do this while users are logging in and out. Screen grabbing the user’s display and performing remote input is a lot of work. The code to do this changes a lot between operating systems. Doing all this on the latest MacOS is amazing. Due to security restrictions, we were not able to perform remote input on the MacOS login screen, but everything else should work correctly. This is an early version, ma...