MeshCentral2 - MeshCtrl, Windows Services, Events, Remote Typing, Time Localization

Progress has been relentless thanks in part to the encouragements from the GitHub community. In the past few weeks we continued to focus on user requested features as the NPM download rate sometime exceeds 10k downloads a week. In addition to fixing many bugs, we added a bunch of new features this week and published a new MeshAgent for Windows (32 and 64bit) thanks for many improvements from Bryan Roe. Here are just some of the highlights:
  • MeshCtrl. As MeshCentral is integrated into various existing software ecosystems, it’s important make MeshCentral integrate well and responsive to other software actors. Administrators may want to automatically create and remove user accounts, automate the creation of device groups and get information on existing device states to feed this data into other software. To enable this MeshCentral now includes MeshCtrl, a command line tool that allows administrative operations on MeshCentral servers. MeshCtrl comes built into MeshCentral when you install the server and can be used locally or remotely to automate many tasks. A new MeshCtrl PDF documentation is now online making it easy to integrate MeshCentral into your usages. Note that MeshCtrl is different from MeshCMD our other command line tool aimed at users and Intel AMT administrators.
  • Windows Services control. With the release of the new Windows Mesh Agent which will automatically update when updating the server, MeshCentral can now view and control the list of installed Windows Services. You can go to the remote desktop tab, hit the “Tools” button to see both running processes and installed services. You can then click on a service to get details and start/stop a service. You can also sort the processes and services lists. This is helpful to remotely trouble shoot issues on a remote system.
  • Improved Event Logs. This latest version of MeshCentral now records many more events. Anything from account creation to performing a remote desktop session, the events are recorded for later auditing. For example, you can drag & drop a file on a remote system and a new event will log this operation. A further improvement is that the user and device event log views are now real-time, showing events as they happen and each event now has links to the corresponding user and device for quick access. The result is a server that is a lot better for people wanting to audit management operations.
  • Remote Typing. A new feature added to MeshCentral is the ability to perform “remote typing”. You can now click on the “Type” button, enter some text and hit ok to have it remotely typed just as if it was entered on the keyboard. You can use this, for example, to enter a URL on a remote computer. You position the remote cursor at the right place, paste the URL in the dialog box and hit ok. This feature only work correctly with US English keyboard right now with other keyboards may get supported in the future.
  • Date & Time Localization. By default MeshCentral will display date and time localized in the format specified by the browser. With the latest versions of MeshCentral, you can now go in the “My Account” tab and override this with a different selection. The selection will be saved on the server for this account, so regardless of what browser is used to login, the date & time will be formatted to your preference.
As usual, feedback is appreciated. The current version of MeshCentral as of this posting is v0.3.8-z.

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





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