MeshCentral - Agent update, Paging, SMS gateway, Help emails, LDAP/OpenID, Web relay sharing

Note that I am out on Vacation until October 17th, 2022.

These last two weeks have brought a lot more improvements to MeshCentral. The most significant change is a new MeshAgent by Bryan Roe compiled on all platforms (Windows, Linux, macOS, BSD – x86, x86-32, ARM, Apple Silicon). The updated agent brings more stability, less memory leaks, updated OpenSSL and additional features. On top of this, the server has gained many more features including support for accounts with 1000’s of devices, custom SMS gateway support, help request emails, LDAP and OpenID membership improvements and a more. It’s been a crazy two weeks with lots going on. In detail:

  • MeshCentral agent update. Each time MeshCentral is released with a new MeshAgent it’s a big deal as all devices running the agent will get updated when the server update. So you don’t want to mess that up. Bryan Roe worked on new agent code that has undergone more rigid testing and many fundamental issues have been fixes. You can see the complete change log here, it’s quite a bit of improvements since the last release. One interesting new feature of the new MeshAgent is corporate auto-proxy support, so the agent will automatically find it’s correct HTTP proxy and use it.
  • MeshCentral device paging. For user accounts with lots of devices, the web page may get slow. MeshCentral now supports showing a portion of the devices from the database at a time with the server tracking what devices are currently being shown on the web page. MeshCentral’s web site is real time and so, shown devices will continue to be updated in real-time while no events will be sent to the web page for hidden devices. The result is a site that is responsive even if a user account has 1000’s of devices in it.
  • Custom SMS gateway support. In addition to Twilio, Plivo and Telnyx, MeshCentral now supports custom SMS gateways. You can now configure MeshCentral to send the phone and SMS message to a target URL for custom handling. With this, 2FA and other features in MeshCentral can work while using any SMS system you wish to use.
  • Help requests email notifications. MeshCentral is used by many for remote assistance, to make this work even better, MeshCentral can now send user help requests by email. MeshCentral users can sign up for these emails on a per-device or per-device group bases. When MeshCentral Assistant generates a help request, you get an email with the device name, username, request text and a quick link to navigate to the correct device. Super useful to help friends, family, and customers.
  • LDAP membership site admin support. In the last few months, LDAP support has improved a lot and this week, support was added to make MeshCentral users site administrator based on LDAP membership groups. So, you setup MeshCentral to automatically grant administrator rights to many users based on LDAP which is great for large organizations.
  • OpenID membership support. Thanks to GitHub contributor mstrhakr, OpenID now also supports user membership features. You can control what rights a user has in MeshCentral based on what OpenID membership groups the user is part of. Just like LDAP, you can control who is allowed to login to the server, control who gets site administrator rights and mirror OpenID membership groups as MeshCentral user groups. Large organizations will like this as it allows much of the user access to be controlled by OpenID.
  • Web relay guest sharing. This is also a big feature. This week saw the combination of MeshCentral’s web relay (access to private web sites thru MeshCentral) combined with device guest sharing (generating limited time URL to access a device). You can now generate a time limited URL that allows a guest with no login access to MeshCentral to access a private web site. This has a lot of interesting usages.

Many other features have been added and bug fixes included. As usual, feedback is appreciated. If you see any problems or need support on something, please create a new issue on GitHub or help other users. For more information, visit the portal at https://meshcentral.com.

Enjoy!
Ylian
MeshCentral, Blog, Twitter,
Reddit, GitHub, YouTube.

 







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