MeshCentral Blog

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...

Apple released its latest operating system, Big Sur along with a new set of devices based on Apple Silicon. MeshCentral now has native support for both Intel x86 and Apple Silicon. Bryan successfully modified and compiled the latest MeshAgent with both compilers along with the creation of a macOS universal binary that includes both binaries. This allows MeshCentral to run at it’s best on both platforms. In addition, there is now support for high DPI displays and more. In detail: Native support for both Intel x86 and Apple Silicon . With the arrival of Apple’s latest devices, MeshCentral now has native support for both Intel x86 and Apple Silicon. The MeshAgent is compiled with both compilers to create two binaries. Then, both binaries are combined to create a universal binary that can run on both platforms. The latest MeshCentral server includes the Intel x86, Apple Silicon and Universal binaries and use all 3 depending on the usage. For initial installation, the universal binary is us...

Mobile devices are a dominant way people access information and when something goes wrong, it’s often the first device you have available. Today, MeshCentral has a significant new improvement to the mobile web site that allows full control over a remote desktop from a mobile device. This is going to be incredibly practical for administrators and technicians that are on the go. In addition to this, we have a new server maintenance mode and improved support for international keyboards. In detail: Remote Desktop Control from Mobile Device . This is the big news. The MeshCentral mobile web site now includes a desktop viewer that can be used to fully control a remote desktop computer. You can move throughout the screen, mouse click using both buttons, toggle the on-screen keyboard, toggle zoom and send special keys like ctrl-alt-del to remotely login to a Windows machines. Look at the pictures below for details. In addition, Intel® AMT hardware KVM is supported, so you can remote control a ...

This week we got a pile more features added to MeshCentral. Four of them standout and so, we will talk about them here. We have a new system to upload one or more files to many remote devices at once, a new live graphic of the CPU and memory usage of remote systems, a new remote file search feature and finally support of international keyboard layouts on Windows. Lots of improvements this week. In detail: Upload files to multiple devices at once . If you want to upload a batch of files to many remote systems all at once, generally you upload to each device one at a time. With the latest MeshCentral administrators can now check many devices, hit the “Group Action” button, select one or more files and a destination path. MeshCentral will then receive the files and start uploading them to each device in a single step. It’s faster and a more efficient this way to perform this operation as the file is sent to the server only once. Live CPU and memory graph . This has been requested by users...