MeshCentral Blog

MeshCentral is an open source web based remote computer management web site. As the software matures, people as increasingly been asking for features that enable remote support usages. For example, having the agent run only temporarily or being able to chat with a user on a remote computer. In the last few months, MeshCentral has gained some of these features including remote text chat. This week, we are doubling down and adding audio, video and file transfer support to the MeshCentral messenger application. Modern browsers have WebRTC for video conferencing and MeshCentral2 is now taking full advantage of this. First, when you establish a chat session, the browser will try to switch to using WebRTC to setup a direct path between the two browsers. If this is successful, all chat messages and file transfers are will go directly between the browsers, skipping the server. This reduces the server traffic, improves server scaling and lowers hosting costs. In addition, once the WebRTC dir...

MeshCentral is an open source web based remote computer management web site. One of the interesting advantages of MeshCentral version 2 is that the server is written entirely in NodeJS and so, can run on many operating systems, including Linux. In addition, it can run very efficiently on tiny appliance devices with limited, CPU and RAM. For example, you can load it on a ASUS Tinker Board , a Latte Panda , a Raspberry Pi or any of such devices. Once installed, it can easily manage 100’s of devices on a local network including remote management thru Intel® AMT when available. You can often install very light operating systems on these appliances that don’t run X Windows, freeing a lot of storage space and RAM. The appliance form factor is perfect for an always on server that you can keep attached to a network router. Some of these boards can run using Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) so, only one cable needs to be plugged in. Once you have a device, get started using our MeshCentral Instal...

MeshCentral can manage a wide range of Windows and Linux computers. This week, we added initial support for Apple MacOS. Once you update to the latest MeshCentral, you will have the option to download and install the MeshAgent for Apple MacOS. In addition, we improved support for reverse proxies, added the first version of MeshMessenger, added Ubuntu 18.04 support and introduced a new built-in chat application. In details: Apple MacOS support. Supporting a new operating system is a lot of work. It’s especially difficult when the MeshAgent is trying to act as a remote desktop server and do this while users are logging in and out. Screen grabbing the user’s display and performing remote input is a lot of work. The code to do this changes a lot between operating systems. Doing all this on the latest MacOS is amazing. Due to security restrictions, we were not able to perform remote input on the MacOS login screen, but everything else should work correctly. This is an early version, ma...

MeshCommander is an open source web-based Intel® AMT management console. It’s a leading edge tool and today, MeshCommander added support for Client Initiated Local Access (CILA) . It's important to be able to remotely manage computers both in software and hardware regardless of where they are connected. Client Initiated Remote Access (CIRA) has been around since Intel® AMT 4.x and provides the way hardware management can connect back to a cloud server. Starting with Intel® AMT 11.6, CIRA is joined by CILA, the local version of the same tunneling system. With CILA, you can now configure Intel® AMT to connect back to a home management server both over the Internet and over the local network . Using a tunneling protocol on the local network means that Intel® AMT is always accurately discovered by the management server. This makes it easy for a server like MeshCentral2 to keep track of all of the Intel® AMT capable devices on a local network. In addition, local management ports (...

MeshCentral is an open source web based remote management server. This last week, MeshCentral was improved again with support for reverse-proxies that allow for improved scalability and flexibility when deploying MeshCentral as a web service. Any serious network administrator will know about reverse-proxies, notably NGINX but many others exists. There are many benefits including more flexibility in how a web server is configured, allows many web applications can run together on the same server, TLS offloading and load balancing. As more people deploy MeshCentral2, it’s became a more frequent request to add proper support for reverse proxies, notably NGINX. This week, a new version of MeshCentral was released on NPM along with a new MeshCentral User’s Guide 0.1.8 and a YouTube video with a tutorial on how to support NGINX . MeshCentral has an interesting design where the Mesh Agents connect to the server using web sockets on the same port that users connect on with browsers. This...

This week is a big one for the standalone version of MeshCommander as version 0.7.1 was released with an improved user interface and more significantly, the ability to connect to a MeshCentral2 account and manage computers over the Internet. Up until now, the standalone MeshCommander has been a break-fix Intel® AMT management console limited to your local network, but this limitation is removed with this new release as MeshCentral2 can act as a Management Presence Server (MPS) for MeshCommander. This new feature allows MeshCommander to perform WSMAN and KVM, SOL, IDER sessions over Intel® AMT remote connections (CIRA) greatly enhancing the capability of an already feature rich tool. There is a new YouTube demonstration video that shows off all the latest improvements. In detail: MeshCommander now has an improved user interface, especially the computer selection screen . The basic idea was to make MeshCommander look a lot like the new user interface of MeshCentral2 which...

One of the amazing features of MeshCentral2 is that it can be installed quickly on pretty much any computer that is Windows or Linux. For Windows users, it’s super easy since the installer that does all the work. You can get a fully working server up and running in a few minutes. Any version of Windows 7 or better will work. This week, the MeshCentral2 installer for Windows was improved significantly . It’s not just an installer anymore, you can scan your local network to find MeshCentral2 servers, edit advanced settings, update the server and more. The new version 1.2 of the installer is available for download here . In details: The installer will only work when connected on the Internet as it will download and install the latest version of MeshCentral2. The new network scanner will find MeshCentral2 servers that are in “LAN mode” or “Hybrid mode” on the local network, this is going to be important for upcoming MeshCentral2 appliance support. The new advanced configuration scre...