Best posts made by Ylian

Good input. Working on a few big ticket items right now (Agent update recovery and Intel AMT CCM activation), but user notification & consent is a frequently asked feature. Will try to give it a first go at it next week.

The MeshCentral Router with relay mapping is indeed, very interesting. By the way, just Published MeshCentral v0.3.1-d with server data collection and charts. You probably want to update and wait a few hours to start getting pretty pictures. Data is logged every 5 minutes. Enjoy. Feedback appreciated.

@dafyre I did enjoy my vacations, but I have to say, I also enjoy working on MeshCentral. It's really fun. Just published MeshCentral 0.3.1-y:

• You can now sync the device names to the device hostnames.
• New server permissions for users to remove rights to create new groups or see MeshCMD link.
• Fixed remote desktop full screen problem.
• Improved terminal. Should be able to run nano/pico/vi much better.

What is the "correct" alternative to MongoDB on Fedora? Maybe I can build a different database binding...

By the way, I just added auto-backup into MeshCentral 0.3.4-t, add this to the "settings" section:

"AutoBackup": {
  "backupInvervalHours": 24,
  "keepLastDaysBackup": 15,
  "zippassword": "test"
}

This will zip a new backup every 24 hours and place the result in "meshcentral-backup". You can optionally say how many days before removing old backups and if you want to password protect the backup zip file, you can set a password. If you use MongoDB, it will call "mongodump" to backup the database and include it in the .zip file.

Just added a new blog on the latest MeshCentral news. Lots more improvements this week. The blog highlights MeshCtrl the MeshCentral administrator command line tool.

Just published MeshCentral v0.4.6-y with User Groups feature fully enabled. Everything should be real-time so, creating a new group, adding users and adding the group to a device group should all show immediate results on all logged in user sessions. Good QA testing and feedback on this feature would be most appreciated.

@mattbagan Follow the instructions to run your own MeshCentral server. No need to log in to anything. On a different topic, MeshCentral.com still runs the old v1 code and I will be migrating it to v2 sometime next year.

Just posted a blog on latest MeshCentral news. One thing I wanted to do for a while now is document the internals of MeshCentral. You may need for technical competence, but the first version of the document is here. - Enjoy.

Latest blog on MeshCentral: https://meshcentral2.blogspot.com/2019/01/meshcentral2-os-support-browser-tabs.html. Lots of improvements, but obviously, still a lot more to do. If you don't want to read it all, just look at the pictures

Just published MeshCentral v0.2.7-p with improved support for hardware keys. Now supports U2F (need browser support) and OTP (USB key acts as a keyboard). Much better than yesterday's version. New blog here.

I am running way behind on documentation. On embedding, let me know what server type will be the master (NodeJS, ASP.NET...). Once you get MeshCentral running, get the --loginTokenKey and cut and paste it into your server. Then, if the master server is NodeJS, use this code to generate a time limited cookie on your server and use it as documented. The user name is "user/(domain)/(account name in lower case)", the sample below is for "admin" on the default domain. hope it helps until I get time to work on documentation.

obj.crypto = require('crypto');
obj.encodeCookie({ u: 'user//admin', a: 3 }, obj.loginCookieEncryptionKey)

// Encode an object as a cookie using a key using AES-GCM. (key must be 32 bytes or more)
obj.encodeCookie = function (o, key) {
    try {
        if (key == null) { key = obj.serverKey; }
        o.time = Math.floor(Date.now() / 1000); // Add the cookie creation time
        const iv = Buffer.from(obj.crypto.randomBytes(12), 'binary'), cipher = obj.crypto.createCipheriv('aes-256-gcm', key.slice(0, 32), iv);
        const crypted = Buffer.concat([cipher.update(JSON.stringify(o), 'utf8'), cipher.final()]);
        return Buffer.concat([iv, cipher.getAuthTag(), crypted]).toString('base64').replace(/\+/g, '@').replace(/\//g, '$');
    } catch (e) { return null; }
};

Everything back to normal now. Sorry about that. Server heap memory optimizations gone wrong. There does seems to be a slow memory leak on the server and I am tracking that down.

We got cut & paste almost done on both Linux and Windows. Most of the code is already these, just turned off until we gets it working well. Hopefully in the next week.

FYI. Just updated MeshCentral Router for Windows with a new relay port map mode. You can now use a remote agent as a TCP relay to access other services on that network. Feedback on it appreciated.

Thanks for reporting it, yes 0.3.2-b had a problem where some agents would disconnect in just the right way and cause a server fault. Should be fixed. Got a lot of small fixes done today.

As for a roadmap, I don't really want one as I don't want to be committing to stuff in advance. However:

• Support for improved Intel AMT activation and usage is going to be coming.
• We are working on a way for a second agent to be on a timer that would call back to the server every few days and perform agent recovery if something goes wrong. This way, it serves as a back-stop if something goes wrong with the agent.
• User notification and/or user consent when taking control of a computer. I really need to get on that.
• Lots of things people are asking for on GitHub...

It's really never ending. It's possible companies could take the open source version and provide a professional version and/or deployments. That would be great and I certainly want to encourage this.

Automatic backup is a good idea. If you have any suggestions, don't hesitate to add them to the GitHub issues list. By the way, last batch of updates includes support for ARMv8 64bit, Web Notifications, some improvements to multi-display selection, working on better tracking of relay sessions. Plenty more bug fixes of course.

This is an interesting suggestion! Can someone send a screen shot of that this landing page look like on other products?

FYI. Started work on a night-mode user interface for MeshCentral. It's in v0.3.4-b, but need to do a bunch more work to get it nice.

@smartkid808 If you see this error:

Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/home/wscheele/views/layouts/main.handlebars'

This was due to a new version of express-handlebars 3.1.0 that broke MeshCentral. I released a new version of MeshCentral last night v0.3.4-k with a fix for this.

@smartkid808 Wow, yes, you got it just right. The saw data and the graph don't match at all. I will work on this...

Perfect thanks. By the way, I have been doing a bunch of updates to MeshCentral, much of it is community driven from GitHub, latest updates on Twitter: https://twitter.com/meshcentral. Just added optional User Session Idle Timeout an hour ago.