MeshCentral - Windows ARM64, NodeJS v11, NPM Packages

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.

  • Windows ARM64 support. The MeshAgent got released for a new OS/CPU build, the Window ARM64 variant. This is useful to get the most efficiency out of a Windows ARM64 platform. This is pretty crazy as this is a binary completely native for ARM64 and having tested it myself, it works great.
  • NodeJS version. MeshCentral now only works with NodeJS v11 and above. In the past it was v10 and above, but as libraries that MeshCentral depends on evolve, it's difficult to keep supporting older NodeJS versions.
  • New NPM package installation system. As you may know, MeshCentral has very few core dependencies, but will install extra modules depending on what features are setup in the config.json file. As NPM evolved over the years, it's behavior changed and so MeshCentral had to change with it. Starting with MeshCentral v1.1.14, all node modules are installed using a single call to NPM and it should fix a bunch of issues with modules not installing right or MeshCentral updating to the latest version when it's not supposed to do that.

Probably by far the most amazing development when it comes to MeshCentral is the amazing work Simon Smith (si458) how submitted a lot of PR's and is motivating me to start moving forward with more updates. Thanks Simon for the ongoing work.

By the way, the MeshCentral application was pulled from the Google Play store a while back, but I am working on getting it published again. There are new requirements like using the new version 33 SDK and other things, hopefully it will be back soon.

Hope everyone is well,
Ylian
MeshCentral, Blog, Twitter,
Reddit, GitHub, YouTube.



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