MeshCentral Blog

This week the big news is that MeshCentral has even more advance code to break apart and re-assemble Windows executables. This code has gotten so good, each section of the executable (code, data, resources, etc.) can now be resized to any dimension needed. This code can now replace bitmaps and icons in a Windows executable prior to timestamping it and signing it and as a result, MeshCentral can now customize a Windows agent even more than before. You can set a different icon file (.ico) for agents in each of your domains. Now, the MeshCentral Agent can have your company or customer’s icon on it. This is all done in seconds on MeshCentral server start. As far as I know, MeshCentral is the only server to do this. On top of this, many more improvements this week. In detail: MeshCentral can now customize Windows agent icon . It’s difficult to break a Windows executable apart, modify the internals and re-assemble it so that is can still run correctly. Many tables, pointers and alignment iss...

MeshCentral has kept up its evolution with many more security related improvements. The big one this week is the integration of a CrowdSec bouncer that is now built-into MeshCentral to allow rapid and collective reactions to internet threats. We also have an improved LDAP integration with account images, optional CAPTCHA for new accounts on the login screen, a powerful improvement to DNS web relay to allow multiple HTTP/HTTPS session at the same time and more improvements to MeshCentral Router and the MeshCentral web site. On a personal note, I will be taking vacations from September 7th to October 19th to mostly travel and relax in Europe. In any case, here are this week’s developments in detail: CrowdSec bouncer integration . CrowdSec is a French company that runs a free, open source, community driven IP address reputation service. Servers install the CrowdSec agent and notify the CrowdSec server of detected threats and from what IP addresses they are coming from which is then sen...

The big new MeshCentral feature this week is web relay, which makes it easy to access any web site that is on any private network that has a MeshAgent is running on it without using any routing software or VPN. This has been a feature that was requests by the community for a long time, since MeshCentral runs within a browser and can route traffic to any network when a MeshAgent is running, it should be possible to click on a link and access remote sites. However, this is much more difficult than it would first appear since the MeshCentral server needs impersonate a remote site. On top of web relay, we have a laundry list of new features including pre-account SSH credentials, improvements to Web-RDP, mouse wheel configuration and more. In detail: Web Relay . We have a video demonstration of this feature here . This new feature allows the MeshCentral server to “impersonate” a remote web site and route all the requests thru a remote agent to a designated target. It allows users to quickly...

MeshCentral is an open source, web based, feature packed computer management web site. MeshCentral development is continuing swiftly, and the blog posts are not keeping up with the number of features being released, so, this week’s post includes plenty of unrelated features and improvements that are making MeshCentral most customized and more secure than ever before. We have many improvements to the Authenticode feature we announced a few weeks back, code to change the resource strings within an executable, MeshCentral Assistant now has the server locking feature, Intel® Standard Manageability support was improved and more improvements to MeshCentral Router. It’s been a crazy month so far and it’s not over. In detail: Authenticode-JS Time Stamping . A few weeks back we released Authenticode-JS, the first ever fully NodeJS tool for code signing Windows executables. This last week, we improved this tool to add support for certificate authority time stamping. This allows an executable tha...

This week is a crazy feature and in many ways an industry first for this type of software. Last week, the first ever purely NodeJS implementation of Authenticode signing was built and added to MeshCentral making it capable of signing Windows executables from any operating system. On top of that, MeshCentral now generates a code signing certificate as part of its standard certificates and automatically signs the Windows Agents. There is even an option to automatically lock the signed agent to only connect to the server that signed the agent. The net result is a Window agent that is uniquely signed to its server. In detail: MeshCentral code signing certificate . MeshCentral already generates many certificates when it first runs: Root, Agent, MPS and HTTPS. With the latest release, a code signing certificate is also generated, issued from the generated self-signed server root certificate. This private code signing certificate is not globally trusted unless the server root cert is trusted....

This week we have many more improvements and fixes that have been mostly requested by the community on GitHub. Following last week’s integration of the web-based RDP client, many improvements have been made to RDP support including mouse wheel and clipboard support. The MeshCentral Router was improved with support for custom applications and this week, the web based SSH terminal and SFTP file transfer clients where both integrated into the web site for use with devices that have MeshAgents. In detail: Web-based RDP improvements . Building on last week’s RDP integration into MeshCentral, this week saw many improvements to the RDP client. You can now specify an alternate starting shell; this is useful for starting up applications into a dedicated RDP session. The mouse wheel is now supported along with shortcut keys, remote typing and most importantly the addition of clipboard support in both directions. You can now pull or push text of your clipboard to the remote device’s clipboard. Th...

This week, there is a special new feature released with MeshCentral v1.0.17. There is now a web-based RDP client integrated into the MeshCentral main web site. Starting today, MeshCentral now has 3 integrated remote desktop protocols: MeshAgent, RDP and Intel® AMT KVM. This significantly enhances the flexibility of MeshCentral when it comes to how it can control remote devices. The MeshAgent and RDP are very different in how they work. The MeshAgent remote desktop will control an existing session while RDP will create a new session. Also, RDP is built into Windows with some optimizations that are not easily available to the MeshAgent. In detail: RDP built into the desktop tab . The desktop tab will now present every possible remote desktop option for a device that is supports, this now includes RDP. Based on a modified node-rdpjs by Sylvain Peyrefitte the RDP client acts differently from a MeshAgent desktop session. The most important difference is that an RDP connection creates a new...