MeshCentral2 - OS support, Browser Tabs, Location & Security

MeshCentral is an open source web based remote computer management web site. The last 2 weeks have been packed with an average of more than two releases a day. This rapid rate has been necessary in order to support the online feedback from everyone installing MeshCentral and giving it a try.

This week, Bryan Roe really shined has he installed more different Linux distributions virtual machines than I have ever seen before. Bryan is testing the MeshAgent on as many Linux variants as he can get his hands on. The remote desktop feature is especially difficult to implement correctly on different Linux distros. Remote desktop is now working on Windows, MacOS, Ubuntu, PepperMint, Zoran, SUSE, Linaro, Fedora, CentOS and Raspbian. A very impressive task. More debugging is being done on all these operating systems, but it’s looking good so far, screenshots below.

In addition this week:
  • You can now Shift-Click on a device in MeshCentral to open it in a different tab. This has been an often requested feature in order to manage many computers at once.
  • MeshCentral now records the last IP address used by the agent when connecting to it. It’s displayed in the “Interfaces” link in the device page. If the IP address is not a private LAN address, it will link to the “iplocation.com” site to get a approximate location of the device.
  • Started looking into database encryption with the goal to support “encrypted at rest” for all data in MeshCentral. This week the “DbEncryptKey” setting was added to the config.json file to encrypt the MeshCentral.db file using AES256-CBC when NeDB is used. For MongoDB, one can use MongoDB Enterprise that supports full DB encryption.
  • Also added this week in the config.json file is the ability to filter both users and agents by IP address. This is useful if you want to only allow users or agents from some IP addresses, or block some IP address ranges.
  • The MeshCentral web application user interface was fixes to support scaling to many more devices. The browser will now “redraw” the page much less frequently when changes occur improving usability and lowering power use on the browser.
  • The MeshCentral server now has a tasks queue and task limiter. This smooths out the server task flow. Before implementing this, the server would try to update 100’s on mesh agents at the same time. Now, it will only update 20 at a time, continuing to the next one each time one is done. This makes the server a lot more responsive even in an agent “connection storm”.
This is just some of the updates made this week. Thanks to everyone that sent bug reports and feedback. Keeping up with them as quickly as possible, please keep sending them in.

Enjoy!
Ylian
MeshCentral2: http://www.meshcommander.com/meshcentral2
Twitter: https://twitter.com/meshcentral



MeshCentral support a wide array of operating systems. The remote desktop
feature is the most difficult to get right across operating systems.

You can now shift-click a device to open it in a new browser tab.
 

Click a device “interfaces” link and the “Last agent address” to get an idea
of the location of this device. The IP address must not be a private LAN address.

New NeDB encryption and IP address filtering now added
 

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