MeshCentral Blog

Quick blog post to say that both MeshCentral2 and MeshCommander now fully support the RMCP discovery protocol for Intel® AMT . For a long time now, Intel® AMT has had the ability to respond to UDP discovery packets, but this is the first time I made full use of this feature in the two big open source tools. You can now quickly scan the network for Intel® AMT computers, select them and add them to the list of managed computers. In addition, you now get an almost live view of what computers are present on the network. This is really nice, you don’t need to guess anymore what computers are present. MeshCentral2 : When it comes to the internet/intranet management web site, RMCP is used to detect the presence of Intel® AMT computers day and night, accumulating data on when the computers are present on the timeline when they show up and go away. It’s also a wonderful way to get a birds eye view on what computers are present on the network at any time. Because MeshCentral2 us...

A quick post to say that I just uploaded a new YouTube video on how to compile MeshCommander for use as a firmware web application for Intel AMT 11 and above. Starting with Intel AMT 11, you can now upload a web application into the firmware that will replace the built-in index.htm page. This is super useful because you can upload a fairly complete Intel AMT management console into the firmware and access it using a browser. MeshCommander was built to do this, you can also read my previous blog on this topic . In this new video, I show how to download the MeshCommander source code and use the Web Site Compiler to build a compress .gz file that can be uploaded into the Intel AMT 11 storage area. Because MeshCommander is open source, your welcome to change and re-brand it anyway you like, in fact, I encourage it. Hope it's helpful, Ylian meshcommander.com

MeshCentral2 development is moving forward at a swift pace and this week, there was plenty more going on. In my view, MeshCentral2 is probably the easiest way to setup your own open source remote device management web site. it is still in beta, and easily available on the NPM site . I am updating MeshCentral2 many times a week and this time around, wanted to highlight a few notable new features: Added support for Linux x86, for both 32bit and 64bit . A few days back I released the first version of MeshCentral2 with Linux support. Improving upon the previous version of MeshCentral, the Linux installation will be a bit different this time around. A script will be downloaded on the Linux computer, that script will attempt to automatically identify the computer and download and install the correct MeshAgent. Makes installing the Linux mesh agent easier since you don’t need to select what port of the agent you need anymore. However, there are only two ports of the Linux agent...

This is a big day as MeshCentral2 is going into BETA . Yesterday I released on MeshCentral2 v0.0.4 on NPM , this is the version I now consider BETA 1. It’s the first version of MeshCentral2 that includes a minimal usable set of feature and the all new MeshAgent2 for Windows . For people not familiar with MeshCentral2, it’s a web site you can install on a server in about a minute that allows you to remotely manage and control other computers on a local network or over the internet using a web portal. It’s super easy to get started. To prove it, I have a new installation YouTube video showing the entire process . Once installed, you can also check out the  next video which goes over some of the typical usages . The new MeshAgent2 is built and maintained by Bryan Roe , who have been working on this agent for many months and 1000’s of hours, including many late nights. Many more bug fixes are still to be done and this server should NOT be used for production usages , but i...

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 ...