MeshCentral Blog

Coming back from spring break in Oregon, I have been at work on the release of MeshCentral 2 Alpha 4 . This is a big release, not only because there are many new features, some never before seen in MeshCentral, but especially because of how MeshCentral2 will get distributed from now on. Being able to quickly setup a new server and keeping it up to date has always been a problem, especially if you want to be able to do this across many platforms like both Windows and Linux. Starting this week, MeshCentral 2 is now distributed on NPM , the NodeJS package manager . People who know what NPM is will immediately understand why this is big news. On many platforms, you now just have to type “npm install meshcentral” and you got the latest MeshCentral2 on your system ready to launch. This change alone will make MeshCentral2 more accessible to more people a lot faster. You can now keep your server up to date easily, just type “npm update meshcentral”. Works on Windows and Linux if N...

Now that Intel® AMT 11.6 is released , it’s finally time to circle back and highlight a big new feature of 11.6 that has been in the works for a long time: Web Storage and the ability for the default Intel® AMT web UI to be replaced. Ever since the start, Intel® AMT has always had a basic web page you could access with any browser. Because it’s all out-of-band, you could access the web page from a browser even if the target computer was soft-off, sleeping or had a non-functioning operating system. Over the last 10 years, the web has come a long way. The built-in Intel® AMT web page offers basic capabilities, but we can do a lot better now with HTML5 and WebSockets. MeshCommander is not only a tool for managing Intel® AMT, it also comes with alternative version of MeshCommander that can be loaded into Intel® AMT 11.6 and above firmware , replacing the default web page and offering most of what any computer administrator would need to remotely manage a computer. In this short...

It’s been a while since the last update to Meshcentral2 , but work is starting up again after a big focus on MeshCommander. While MeshCommander is the web based Intel® AMT console, Meshcentral2 is the entire solution for web based remote management for both computer with and without Intel® AMT . I just put online Alpha3 of MeshCentral2. It’s not ready for common use yet, and being made available for people that want to check out early code. The focus on this release is on basic infrastructure of the server, something that will be important as the work moves along. In this version, the main new feature is multi-tenancy support . Meshcentral2 can run one instance of the server with one database, but support many customers at once. Each customer gets to administer the site independently and has its own set of users and permissions. This architecture allows a lot more flexibility in server setup while pooling database, server, backups and other resources. It also makes it easy ...

As it’s been cold and snowing in Oregon for the past few days, a great time to catch up on code releases and fixes. As part of catching up, I released MeshCommander 0.4.3 with plenty of bug fixes and the addition of Intel® AMT Alarm Clock support . MeshCommander can now help administrators manage wake events within Intel® AMT that cause the computer to wake up regardless of the network connectivity state. In many cases, instead of sending a wake command to Intel® AMT, it’s more practical to setup the wake even ahead of time and just have Intel® AMT perform the wake operation on its own. I would like to thank Joko Sastriawan for this work on this feature in MeshCommander, he is the one that got the feature started and fully working for the first time. In addition to this, I have made many more fixes in MeshCommander to improve its robustness. Fixes range from improved HTTP pipelining to IDER timers and certificate checking improvements. Speaking of certificates, we also...

A few days back I released MeshCommander v0.3.8 with quite a bit of improvements to how MeshCommander deals with Intel® AMT TLS. Anyone that works with Intel® AMT knows that certificates are a big part of the process. Often times, administrators use various different tools to deal with management and security separately but with this new version of MeshCommander, we built a new certificate management tool right in. Its should now be easier to setup TLS traffic encryption and authenticate that you are communicating to the correct machine. At a high level, here are the major new additions: Built-in Certificate Manager & TLS checking & certificate pinning. Create new root certificates or issue sub-CA certificates from existing root certificates. Import and export certificates, as easy as drag & dropping a certificate into the tool. Create Intel® AMT certificate easily using a root certificate that is already in MeshCommander. All new TLS authentication system,...

We just released MeshCommander 0.3.1 as we continue to improve the first fully web based management console for Intel® AMT. This week, we have three new major features in addition to lots of other improvements and bug fixes. Custom Power Actions . Intel® AMT support many power actions, a major feature for remote manageability. Being able to fully control the many aspects of platform boot can be complex, MeshCommander has a set of pre-canned power actions but for complicated boot requirements, we now offer a fully customizable power action dialog box. Control the boot process, lock the local keyboard, blank the screen and much more.   User Consent Support for IDE-R. The NW.js version of MeshCommander now fully support not only User Consent for Power Actions and KVM, but this week we added IDE-R user consent. This is super important for usages that require IDE-R in Client Control Mode (CCM). This completes MeshCommander’s support for user consent usages. ...

Fresh off the latest release of MeshCommander 0.2.8 , I just released MeshCentral2 Alpha 2 , the very latest in super easy to setup and use cloud management solution. MeshCentral2 now has a full Intel® AMT MPS server so it can now receive and handle Client Initiated Remote Access (CIRA) connections. Better yet, it does so better than any software I have seen before. You can go from almost nothing to running your own server and managing Intel® AMT computers over the cloud in a few minutes. On top of all that, MeshCentral2 integrates the very latest version of MeshCommander so you can not only get Intel® AMT connections setup quickly, you can use these connections to immediately manage your computers and it’s all web based. Along with this release, I recorded a YouTube tutorial video showing how to get CIRA setup. In this version, we setup CIRA manually using MeshCommander. In some ways, this is pretty amazing since you need lots of software working perfectly to perform t...