MeshCentral Blog

This week is the last feature release for a little while because of traveling and vacations coming up and a bit more focus on bug fixes. This said, we have a bunch of really good features released this week that improve MeshCentral2. The focus was on making administration of a MeshCentral2 server and users a lot better. New this week: Improved user management . For server administrators, the “My Users” tab is much better. Administrators will immediately see the difference. Users are now listed with online users on the top, improved indications of validated emails and for each user, there is now a full sub-section with user information and configuration and events for each user. You can how edit the email address, validation status, server rights and update the password in a single screen. The user management look and feel as also been improved. The user login timeline is not yet implemented, a placeholder is currently displayed. Account locking . Administrators can now lock out use...

The pace of releases is accelerating as the core components of MeshCentral2 are maturing and it’s getting easier to build new features. The “all JavaScript” nature of MeshCentral2 with the browser, server, database and agent all being JavaScript makes things easy for developers. This week, we have 3 major new features to announce : New process control panel . When in the “Desktop” tab, you can now hit the “Tools” button to toggle the new tools view. In that panel, you will see the list of processes the remote computer is running both on Linux and Windows. In addition, you can sort the processes by ID or names and terminate a process remotely using the small garbage icon. One more way MeshCentral2 makes remote management of computers easy. Temporary Agent support . The MeshCentral server supports having the agent running in temporary mode. You can now download the agent executable and run it directly from the dialog box. The agent will keep running as long as the dialog box is open. ...

This week, Bryan Roe significantly improved the MeshCmd tool that is included in MeshCentral2 and available as a standalone download. Bryan added the capability to run MicroLMS and MeshCommander in the background and this on both Linux and Windows. Starting today, you can download MeshCmd and run: meshcmd microlms install/start/stop/uninstall meshcmd meshcommander install/start/stop/uninstall This will install and start in the background MicroLMS with LMS MeshCommander for local management, or MeshCommander for remote management. On Windows, it’s installed as a standard Windows Service. On Linux, the installation will work correctly on both newer systemd and older initd Linux computers, with the installation adapting correctly to each. In addition, MeshCentral2 got many bug fixes, security hardening and a few new features this week. Notably, you can now switch between the multi-desktop view and taking control of a computer’s desktop without the connection having to be re-establ...

This week is spring break in Oregon and we are going to celebrate with a smaller and more fun MeshCentral2 update. We just released support for viewing multiple computers desktop at the same time . This is very useful for digital signage usages where you want to monitor the screens of many computers in real time. In MeshCentral2 v0.1.5-p , you can now select “Desktops” in the view drop-down on the top right of the devices view. You will see all your currently connected computers and you can click on the screens to toggle connection to that device. On the multi-desktop screen, you click “Connect all” or “Disconnect all” to connect/disconnect all screens at once. Check “AutoConnect” to connect to all desktops and automatically connect to any new computer that comes online. Like all of the other screens on MeshCentral2, the multi-desktop screen is fully real time, with computer names, icons and status being updated on the web page without user interaction. If you are looking at managi...

Just posted on the MeshCommander.com web site a new do-it-all command line tool for Intel® AMT that runs on both Windows and Linux . The new tool is called “MeshCmd” also called “MeshCommand”. It makes it easy to do all sorts of things with Intel AMT including: get Intel AMT state, perform basic activation, LMS services, configuration and remote management of other Intel AMT computers on the network and much more. If you are in the Intel AMT space, take a look at the new MeshCmd tutorial video on YouTube , it’s really worth a watch. MeshCmd is a single executable file available for download on MeshCommander.com along with a full user’s guide (pdf). Here is a quick list of what MeshCmd can do in the context of Intel AMT: Get the local state of Intel AMT, including version, activation state and more. Show the Intel AMT audit log of your local computer (even without any credentials) or of a remote computer. Startup LMS services along with local hosting of MeshCommander for L...

MeshCentral is an open source web based remote computer management web site. We release new versions many times a week and this week we added a bunch of more interesting features & improvements: New MeshCentral installer for Windows . MeshCentral2 is pretty amazing in that you can install and run a new server easily and within minutes on both Windows and Linux. However, for Windows users we just made the process of getting your own MeshCentral2 server up and running even simpler with the all new MeshCentral2 installer for Windows . This installer will automatically detect, download and install NodeJS if needed along with installing the very latest version of MeshCentral. It can also be used for limited configuration of the server to get you started and to perform server updates. The new installer is fast, interactive and super simple. Anyone can launch a remote management service in minutes. Wide screen toggle . You can now toggle the web page to use the full widt...

MeshCentral offers web based remote desktop, terminal and file transfer allowing administrators to access and remotely manage computers on the local network or over the Internet. So far, we had to relay the traffic from the user’s browser thru the server to the mesh agent on the remote computer creating a lot of traffic on the server which slows down the connections and adds to server workload and hosting costs. To go a long way to solving the traffic relay thru the server problem, last week the latest version of MeshCentral2 was published with WebRTC support turned on by default . This feature is in large part due to many longs days and late night coding sessions by Bryan Roe who worked on fixing and updating BCP’s WebRTC data stack for this usage. With this new version, the Browser and Mesh Agent will attempt to communicate directly to each other using WebRTC bypassing the server entirely. If successful, the remote desktop and terminal session are faster, lower-latency a...