MeshCentral2 - 500k Downloads & Session Recordings

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 in one: A server capable of recording sessions, a new recording file format and the all new MeshCentral Session Player for session playback. In detail:
  • MeshCentral’s Recoding Capability. When configured, MeshCentral that already acts as a traffic relay between the browser, agents and Intel AMT will now record traffic. The server will also notify the browser and agent that the session is being recorded with new recording icons displayed to indicate this. The MeshCentral Intel AMT traffic relay and CIRA server are also equipped with session recording capabilities. Lastly, MeshCommander that is built into MeshCentral now supports the recording indication and displays the recoding icon when needed.
  • Session Recoding File Format. The new “.mcrec” file format was created to quickly record network traffic with minimal effort. The new format encodes session metadata along with traffic time, direction and in the case of web socket, the traffic data type. The content of this new file format is a perfectly re-playable TCP/Web Socket session, perfect for auditing.
  • MeshCentral Session Player. In what is probably the largest and most complex piece of code of this new feature, we now have a new session player web application that can take in a “.mcrec” and play it back. The new player is accessible at “/player.htm” on any updated MeshCentral server and will currently play Remote Desktop, Terminal and Intel AMT KVM sessions. The player support many view modes, play/pause/restart commands, a progress bar and control of the play speed (from ¼ to 10x speed).
Administrators that configure their MeshCentral servers to record will need to be ready to handle a lot of very large files. Note that the https://meshcentral.com public server will not be recording any management sessions. As usual, feedback is appreciated. The current version of MeshCentral as of this posting is v0.3.9-v.

Enjoy,
Ylian
Twitter: https://twitter.com/meshcentral
GitHub: https://github.com/Ylianst/MeshCentral/issues
MeshCentral2: http://www.meshcommander.com/meshcentral2






Popular posts from this blog

Starting work at Microsoft

Image
Hi everyone. It’s been a while since the last blog post and I wanted up update everyone on what is going on. As many of you know already from a discussion on GitHub , Bryan and I have been laid-off from Intel in early November 2022. This was quite a surprise as MeshCentral, MeshCommander, MeshCMD and other tools where widely used. This said, Intel has been having poor financials and Bryan and I where part of a very large first wave of downsizing by the company that involved many people that I know and worked with for a long time. I had been working for Intel for over 25 years having started in September 1998. Over the years I worked on IPsec key negotiation, Universal Plug & Play, DLNA and Intel® AMT. I loved working on all these projects and especially loved working with the open-source community on Mesh projects. Obviously, this was not my decision and Bryan and I had look for what comes next. One option was to continue working on MeshCentral as part of another company or with
Read more

MeshCentral - Windows ARM64, NodeJS v11, NPM Packages

Image
Hi all. It's been a while since I last posted and now that I am settling a bit more in my work at Microsoft, I have a bit of time to occasionally look after MeshCentral again. It's about time, there where a bunch of things that needed to get fixed. Before that, I want to say that I am doing great. I am working on Microsoft Forms which is one of the offerings of Microsoft 365. For kicks, I started a YouTube channel on Microsoft Forms here during a Microsoft hacking week. I tried to up my game since the videos I last published for MeshCentral. Also, I wanted to share pictures below. I was at a Tesla Supercharger last weekend and, by luck, got to see a Tesla Cybertruck in person. It's very big. Obviously, this is a release candidate driven by a Tesla employee. I saw it after attempting to see the solar eclipse over Oregon, but sadly, too many clouds and saw nothing. In any case, back to MeshCentral. In the last few months a few things have happened with the new releases. Wind
Read more

MeshCentral - New Windows Agents - Installation Dialog, Customization and Server Lock

Image
Lots is going on with MeshCentral, just yesterday Bryan Roe released a new MeshAgent for Windows with many improvements. An improved installation dialog box, logo customization and, to continue MeshCentral’s leadership in security, a new agent code signing locking feature that will surely be used by many to improve trust and security of their MeshCentral installation. In addition to this, we have many more server improvements to cover. In detail: MeshAgent with improved installation dialog box . The new MeshAgent for Windows is much improved with months of changes and bug fixes. The most noticeable feature is by far the new installation dialog with the new logo and connection details button. The new installer is a lot friendlier and easier on end-users. MeshAgent with improved customizations . In addition to all the existing agent customizations available in prior versions, the MeshAgent has new server settings for the installation text and logo. You can now set your own 200x200 PNG c
Read more