MeshCentral Blog

Starting this week, MeshCentral can start managing an all new class of devices. A few days back, Google Play Store accepted and published the MeshCentral Agent for Android. This marks the first steps in adding basic mobile device management to MeshCentral and offers many opportunities for the future. You can pair Android devices with your own MeshCentral server and start seeing the device on the web site. On top of that, MeshCentral is included in the GitHub Arctic Code Vault which is really cool. In details: MeshCentral Android Agent . Look at the demonstration video here . The community had requested mobile management in the past and work started a few weeks back using Android Studio and the Kotlin programming language to build a basic MeshCentral Agent for Android. Most of the work had to do with pairing the agent to the server and opening a secured, trusted connection to the server. Currently, the Android Agent uses a built-in QR code reader to pair the application with your own s...

Once again in the last week there have been huge improvements to MeshCentral. While many of the changes are visible to MeshCentral users, the focus this week will be on internal changes that are not seen by anyone but are important to making things work smoothly. The two big internal changes are the addition of a second independent way of updating the Mesh Agent remotely and big scaling improvements in how MeshCentral accesses the MongoDB database for massive speed and scalability gains. Another notable feature is Mesh Agent support for ChromeOS when in debug mode. This week, many of the improvements are thanks for Bryan Roe who released a much-improved Mesh Agent and installation and update infrastructure. In details:   Dual agent update path . One of the most complicated parts of MeshCentral is the agent which must support many different platforms and be capable of self-updating correctly on all of them. Starting with MeshCentral v0.7.48, there are now two independent ways of per...

In this first blog of 2021, we again did not stop adding more improvements and features to MeshCentral. This week the focus was on the mobile web application and the MeshCentral Messenger system that allows two users or a user and a remote device to chat, exchange files and start audio and video streams. Remote management using mobile devices is increasingly and so, the MeshCentral mobile app now gets enhanced with notifications and more. In details: Mobile Notifications . The MeshCentral mobile application gained support for user notifications. This is the yellow messages that can pop-up at the top of the screen. This is an important new feature as user notifications are used for all sorts of things. They can confirm some operations have been executed correctly or not, or they can be used to send important system messages to currently log in users and more. As you see the screens below, the notifications for mobile devices are specially designed for touch screens. MeshCentral Messenge...

On this last day of 2020, we look forward with a taste of what is to come for the next year. MeshCentral now has a new front page on MeshCentral.com , making the freely available, use at your own risk, community management server also the MeshCentral promotional page. For the last few years, meshcental.com was the community management site and people who wanted to setup their own server had to go on the MeshCommander.com site to get documentation and tutorial videos. This never made sense and today, this is finally rectified with a nice looking new MeshCentral front page on MeshCentral.com. In details: Improved MeshCentral site hosting . MeshCentral has been improved so it’s both a management web site and a generic web server at the same time. This is practical if you want to run a single software, but also serve some static content like a new front page. In addition, you can now redirect the root URL to a different site allowing users to see a different landing page on your MeshCentra...

This is going to be the last post of 2020 and finishing off the year with another big release. In the past two week the Mesh team learned the Swift programming language and how XCode and SwitfUI worked. It’s been a difficult learning curve but used the time to build a completely new version of MeshCentral Router for macOS. This release complements the MeshCentral Router for Windows that was released a long time ago. As a recap, MeshCentral Router allow TCP port mapping of local ports to remote ports on any device in your MeshCentral account. Once mapped, you can open web pages, used any TCP application you like including performing an SSH or RDP session to a remote device without a VPN. This capability is super useful to many users and now, it’s available on macOS! In details: Native Swift built MeshCentral Router . This is a full rebuild of MeshCentral Router for macOS coded in XCode with the Swift programming language. The binary is compiled for both Intel x86 and Apple Silicon ...

This morning the community has achieved an important milestone… The exact count as of writing this blog is 1,000,242. This is an excellent moment to review the year 2020 and to thank everyone in the community that has contributed with bug reports, language translations and feedback. It’s all very much appreciated and helps everyone improve their device management. Just in 2020, there has been to date well over 400000 downloads of MeshCentral on NPM. On many days MeshCentral is downloaded over 1000 times with a few days where there are 2000 or more downloads. This is a significant increase over the last years and some of it due to more people looking for remote management solutions during COVID. As seen in the graphs below, there has been a significant increase in downloads in the April 2020 timeframe. This is the first full year where MeshCentral is internationalized into many languages and so, this has likely also helped with worldwide usage. Looking at GitHub, the number of commits a...

Work on MeshCentral is continuing at a quick pace and we have a set of security related topics to cover. Earlier this year, the security company IOActive was contracted to perform a security review of MeshCentral. This is important in order to have an independent assessment of issues and where security could be improved. We also added and tested CloudFlare support which is a widely internet service for securing and optimizing the performance of web site. This will help administrator improve their site’s security. Lastly, we updated all MeshCentral agents with the latest OpenSSL security library. In details: IOActive security review . IOActive is a security company that employs researchers that have found many security issues in the past . They have been contracted to perform a security review of MeshCentral. This is important since you want to have independent experts looking at the architecture and code and criticizing it from as many angles as possible. Of course, security is...