MeshCentral Blog

A few days back I released MeshCommander v0.3.8 with quite a bit of improvements to how MeshCommander deals with Intel® AMT TLS. Anyone that works with Intel® AMT knows that certificates are a big part of the process. Often times, administrators use various different tools to deal with management and security separately but with this new version of MeshCommander, we built a new certificate management tool right in. Its should now be easier to setup TLS traffic encryption and authenticate that you are communicating to the correct machine. At a high level, here are the major new additions: Built-in Certificate Manager & TLS checking & certificate pinning. Create new root certificates or issue sub-CA certificates from existing root certificates. Import and export certificates, as easy as drag & dropping a certificate into the tool. Create Intel® AMT certificate easily using a root certificate that is already in MeshCommander. All new TLS authentication system,...

We just released MeshCommander 0.3.1 as we continue to improve the first fully web based management console for Intel® AMT. This week, we have three new major features in addition to lots of other improvements and bug fixes. Custom Power Actions . Intel® AMT support many power actions, a major feature for remote manageability. Being able to fully control the many aspects of platform boot can be complex, MeshCommander has a set of pre-canned power actions but for complicated boot requirements, we now offer a fully customizable power action dialog box. Control the boot process, lock the local keyboard, blank the screen and much more.   User Consent Support for IDE-R. The NW.js version of MeshCommander now fully support not only User Consent for Power Actions and KVM, but this week we added IDE-R user consent. This is super important for usages that require IDE-R in Client Control Mode (CCM). This completes MeshCommander’s support for user consent usages. ...

Fresh off the latest release of MeshCommander 0.2.8 , I just released MeshCentral2 Alpha 2 , the very latest in super easy to setup and use cloud management solution. MeshCentral2 now has a full Intel® AMT MPS server so it can now receive and handle Client Initiated Remote Access (CIRA) connections. Better yet, it does so better than any software I have seen before. You can go from almost nothing to running your own server and managing Intel® AMT computers over the cloud in a few minutes. On top of all that, MeshCentral2 integrates the very latest version of MeshCommander so you can not only get Intel® AMT connections setup quickly, you can use these connections to immediately manage your computers and it’s all web based. Along with this release, I recorded a YouTube tutorial video showing how to get CIRA setup. In this version, we setup CIRA manually using MeshCommander. In some ways, this is pretty amazing since you need lots of software working perfectly to perform t...

We just released MeshCommander 0.2.8 , this is part of our ongoing work to build a fully web based and completely portable Intel® AMT console across all platforms. In this release we have improve the tool significantly. In the last week alone, we released versions 0.2.6, 0.2.7 and 0.2.8 continuing on a rapid cadence. Here are the major improvements for the last two weeks: Built-in IDER support in MeshCommander.exe for Windows. Starting with this version of MeshCommander for Windows, you can now start an disk redirection session directly from within MeshCommander. No need for a separate IDER server anymore. Makes everything easy and so, you can quickly reboot a computer to a disk image of your choice.   More Serial-over-lan terminal emulation types. Depending on the BIOS vendor, the terminal emulation used varies. Intel uses “Extended ASCII” but other vendors use “UTF8” which allows for internationalization of the BIOS over TV100. Starting with this version of M...

For the last eight years, I have been designing and building MeshCentral . It’s a wonderful web site for remote management of computers, cell phones and devices. A few months back, I started looking as to where I want to go with MeshCentral. Web technologies have comes a long ways in eight years. For example, web sockets did not exist and browsers where a lot less powerful. These days web frameworks and IoT devices have changed the landscape. It’s also possible to code things in a much simpler way. As a result, I started working on MeshCentral2 and today, I am making it available for the first time. This is a very early alpha, only works with Intel® AMT on local networks, but it’s an interesting start and you can already see the benefits. One of the first big changes is that MeshCentral2 server is now completely built on NodeJS enabling it to run on Windows, Linux and OSX. It’s now a single easy to install package and the web interface is now fully interactive. You nev...