MeshCentral Blog

This week has been busy with significantly increased traffic on Github , once again, thank you to everyone that is reporting bugs and helping out. We now have real-time server charts showing connection counts and memory use, new support for FIDO2/WebAuthn for second factor authentication and an improved MeshCentral router with relay mapping for remote access to many more devices on remote networks. Live Server Statistics Charts . It’s important to keep track of server load and health and in order to help with this, the latest version of MeshCentral includes a new server statistics tab with live charts of the server’s current state. The graph has animated transitions and will update automatically as time goes by. In addition, you can download the raw chart data using a download button on the upper right of the chart. FIDO2 / WebAuthn Support . MeshCentral already had support for 2 factor authentication hardware tokens using the U2F protocol. However, this is the old way of doing thin...

Because MeshCentral is web based, usages are generally built within the browser which is great sometimes, but not always. Today, we are changing that with the MeshCentral Router for Windows , a tool that allows users to port map any TCP port on their local computer to any port on any remote computer in their MeshCentral account. So, you can now port map the SSH port to a IoT device and launch PuTTY to get a fast terminal connection, or better yet, map port 3389 and get a fast RDP remote desktop session to remote PC’s. The MeshCentral Router opens a plenty of new possibilities for your MeshCentral server. Take a look at the YouTube demonstration video to see how it all works . In details: Works to any MeshCentral2 server. Many have setup their own MeshCentral server and this tool will work with it as long, just update your server to the latest version before starting. Support for 2nd factor authentication. Even if this is a Windows application, the new MeshCentral server allows 2nd f...

It’s been a white since the last report and lots of progress has been made. Probably most notably is the increase in GitHub traffic where more people than are submitting bug reports and feature requests. Only a month ago there was about 20 open issues, now it’s up to 36 open issues with 93 having been closed so far. Many thanks to everyone that takes the time to write up reports on Github, it’s much appreciated. This week, we got a bunch more improvements with notable thanks to Bryan Roe who is working nights, days and on his vacations to get issues closed. This last few week’s highlights: Clipboard management support on Windows and Linux . One of the frequently asked feature request on GitHub was for the addition of remote clipboard support. With the latest version of MeshCentral, you can now transfer text to and from a remote device’s clipboard on Windows and Linux. This is amazingly useful feature, but a very difficult one to implement as the agent needs to figure out what user c...

This week, we got a bunch more interesting updates to the code base. Along with many more bug fixes, one feature request that was made on GitHub was to allow devices to be switched between device groups . In addition, MeshCentral is getting deployed a bunch more and so, work has been put in to optimize the MongoDB queries and indexes. Starting testing many 1000’s of connections to MeshCentral on relatively small cloud instances . So far, it seems an instance at 30$/month plus traffic costs will host a MeshCentral instance that will handle 10000+ agents. Lastly, started writing MeshCentral install scripts for various cloud provider instances so you can install MeshCentral easily in a few minutes. In details: Move devices between groups . Device groups are built to apply the same policy to set of user permissions to a group of devices. In the past a device would join a group at install time and this group could not be changed. This caused issues because administrators did not have t...

MeshCentral is an open source web based remote computer management web site. Because administrators can use MeshCentral to manage hundreds to thousands of computers remotely, the server is a security target. It’s important to support the best industry practices to try to minimize security risk. This week, three new security features where added to MeshCentral. Support for hardware authentication keys . A few weeks back, work got started on adding 2-factor authentication to MeshCentral. First, with support for Google Authenticator. This week, we improve on this with support for hardware keys. You can get a YubiKey starting at 15$ that acts as a hardware based second authentication factor. Users first have to register their key with the web site. Then when logging in and after entering the username and password, user’s will be prompted for a login token. At this point, press the button on the USB key and your automatically logged in. It’s super simple and can be used alongside Google...

MeshCentral is an open source web based remote computer management web site. The last 2 weeks have been packed with an average of more than two releases a day. This rapid rate has been necessary in order to support the online feedback from everyone installing MeshCentral and giving it a try. This week, Bryan Roe really shined has he installed more different Linux distributions virtual machines than I have ever seen before. Bryan is testing the MeshAgent on as many Linux variants as he can get his hands on. The remote desktop feature is especially difficult to implement correctly on different Linux distros. Remote desktop is now working on Windows, MacOS, Ubuntu, PepperMint, Zoran, SUSE, Linaro, Fedora, CentOS and Raspbian . A very impressive task. More debugging is being done on all these operating systems, but it’s looking good so far, screenshots below. In addition this week: You can now Shift-Click on a device in MeshCentral to open it in a different tab. This has been an of...

MeshCentral is being deployed at an ever increasing rate with more computers being managed it’s important that it be done as securely as possible. Last week, the MeshAgent got TPM support for hardening of device identity, this week it’s the user’s turn to have improved authentication with support for Google Authenticator and compatible applications. When logging into a web site, users are normally prompted for a username and password. This however can be a weak form of authentication. Especially for sites like MeshCentral that manage many computers, it’s important to authenticate users in the most secure way possible. One solution is RFC4226 and RFC6238 that standardize a way to transfer a pre-shared key to a user and compute a time limited token than is a second login factor. Google has a quick guide on 2 step authentication here which can be helpful. Starting with MeshCentral v0.2.6-j there is now full support for 2-step login. This is an optional process and to get it setu...