MeshCentral Blog

This week the feature steamroller kept moving forward as more versions of MeshCentral are rapidly released with the community’s help. As usual, more bug fixes where made. This week, the focus was on making it easier for MeshCentral installations to comply with proper administrative procedures, notably, automated off-side backups and server auditing. The big addition was automated backup’s to Google Drive making MeshCentral installations more robust than ever. In detail: Google Drive Automated Backups. As many administrators know, when running a cloud server like MeshCentral, it’s important to not only make regular server backup’s, but also keep the backups off-site. The latest version of MeshCentral makes this easy by offering built-in support for uploading server backup’s to Google Drive. MeshCentral already creates daily encrypted backups, but now, you can setup a trusted link to a Google account using OAuth and MeshCentral will upload and automatically manage backup’s in the Google...

This week we got a pile more improvements for MeshCentral. The online community has been great, Bryan and I are having a hard time keeping up with all the feedback and contributions but doing our best. Just this week, we received improved translations in Spanish and French and a completely new translation of MeshCentral is Finnish. Thank you to Mika Laavola for the hard work with Finnish, very much appreciated. We got a pile of improvements, so in detail: MeshCentral Router Compression. Following up on the previous announcement that MeshCentral supports web socket compression, this week the latest MeshCentral Router now also supports compression. If your MeshCentral server has this feature enabled, MeshCentral Router will automatically detect this and compress traffic to and from the server and this, for TCP/UDP traffic routes and remote desktop. Also new to this latest version is live network traffic dialog boxes so you can see how much data is being sent and received and the compres...

As we work with the GitHub community on many topics, there was an interesting request last week.  The request was to be able to hand out a browser link that would allow a device to be remotely controlled for a limited amount of time to anyone with the link. This link could be used without server account and would be perfect to grant device access for a guest. Well, this week we implemented this feature in MeshCentral and the feedback has been wonderful. This is on top of many other features and bug fixes that was completed this week. In detail: Remote Desktop Sharing . This is the big new feature of the week. If you even need to have a friend take over a specific device for a limited time, you no longer need to give them a MeshCentral account. Instead, you go in a device, hit the share button and create a limited time remote desktop link. The maximum time is 1 hour, and you must enter a guest name for auditing purposes. Once done, send the link to your friend and they can immediat...

This week we got another batch of updates and improvements to MeshCentral and the MeshCentral Agent. I do want to thank the GitHub community for their help finding issues, feature suggestions and help with translations. This week the main announcement is the addition of self-installing binaries for many non-Windows platforms (Linux, macOS and BSD). Just like with Windows, MeshCentral can now generate on-the-fly a self-installing binary for many platforms that include server and account connection information and more. This is all thanks to Bryan Roe for agent improvement to make this possible. You can now download, execute and install the agent using only the binary. In detail: Linux, macOS, BSD Self-installing Agent Binaries . MeshCentral supports many platforms, but in the past only the Windows had a self-installing agent binary. Now, this has been added to many other platforms that run graphical user interfaces. You can opt to download an agent for 64bit x86 Linux, MeshCentral will ...

As MeshCentral is increasingly popular as a self-hosted remote management solution, many may not realize that in addition to the hosting costs of running the server, hosting providers also change for traffic. In the case of Amazon AWS, inbound traffic is free but outbound traffic from the server is charged at $0.09 US per GB, the first GB being free. This means that even if you are using a 35$/mo instance to manage over 10k+ devices, the monthly costs of the network traffic can be significantly higher than server cost depending on usage. With the latest published version of MeshCentral, many new features where added to help increase server speed, scalability and reduce hosting costs thru minification and compression. The sum of which can result in a significant reduction of hosting costs. This week, Bryan Roe added ZIP/DEFLATE support to the MeshAgent for compressed updates and traffic compression. In addition, the MeshCentral server now has addition support for traffic compression and...

In the last few weeks, we made many more improvements to the quality and security of MeshCentral. One area that is important when managing 100’s or 1000’s of computers with remote software agents that encounter many different situations is to get actionable data back when something happens. This week, MeshCentral got a new optional automated feature that turns on the MeshAgent crash dump feature and fetches crash dump files when needed. This along with many other improvements will keep improving software quality and reliability moving forward. In detail: Automated Agent Crash Dump . Thanks to Bryan Roe, the MeshCentral agent has had the ability to generate a crash dump file on all platforms (Windows, Linux, BSD, macOS) when this feature was activated. With the most recent release of MeshCentral, this agent feature can now be activated from the server. In addition to this, if an agent crash dump file is present on a remote machine, MeshCentral can now automatically retrieve it. This wil...

Today, MeshCommander v0.8.6 was published with more features and bug fixes. By far the most important improvement to MeshCommander is its new internationalization support with, in addition to English, 9 new languages supported including Japanese and Simplified Chinese. This will help broaden the number of people that can make use of Intel® AMT in their native language. In addition to this, KVM session recoding is now built-into MeshCommander, a feature that was only available on MeshCentral in the past. In Detail: Multi-language support. The Windows MSI installed version of MeshCommander now offers an additional menu to switch between 10 languages. Supported languages: Dutch, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, German, Chinese, Portuguese, Russian in addition to English. These are machine translations and since MeshCentral is open source, the community is very much encouraged to help improve the translations. The translation file is on GitHub here. The same format and tools used for ...