MeshCentral
(Information Portal)

Transition to MeshCentral2

There is a MeshCentral v2 server now at https://meshcentral.com and all accounts have been moved over to the new server.

As indicated in the terms of service, this server is run for free as part of the community that builds MeshCentral, the open source remote control management web site. This site is not associated with any companies or corporations, it's run by myself in the spirit of benefiting the open source community. Basically, if you use this site, you are a tester for this site. There is no obligation or expectations that this site to be running now or in the future or that this site is now or will be in the future secure and/or free of hackers or security issues. You use this site completely at your own risk. If the site goes down, please don't mail anyone that it's not working. You should not be using it for anything important in the first place. If you are a business, please don't depend on this web site for running your business.

Running Your Own Server

MeshCentral is fully open source and you are encouraged to run your own server. You can get started here. You can get MeshCentral2 on NPM, take a look at the blog or Twitter channel.

Running your own MeshCentral server is cheap. You can use an Amazon AWS t3.nano running Amazon Linux2 for 3.75$/month plus traffic cost and manage about 100+ devices easy. An Amazon AWS t3.medium will manage 10000+ devices for 30$/month plus traffic cost. So there is no excuse not to run your own. You get to only allow the people you want and access all administrator controls. Other options include installing the MeshCentral server on a normal desktop PC or even a Raspberry Pi for managing computers on your local area network.

Background History

Work on MeshCentral v1 started in late 2008. When MeshCentral v1 was first designed, most browsers did not support web sockets or HTML5 and WebRTC was a ways off. Web technologies have changed a lot since MeshCentral's original design and at some point it was time for a major update. Last year, I started work on MeshCentral2 and it's been doing great.

MeshCentral2 has many benefits over the older version:

  • Faster, Real-time web site. With MeshCentral2 everything is real time, no more hitting the refresh button. Also, we use the web application model so the web site a very fast.
  • Two-factor authentication. MeshCentral2 supports the Google Authenticator app, U2F and OTP hardware keys and one-time backup codes. This helps protect account a lot more than just a username and password. Please consider making use 2 factor authentication and configure a few options so you got a backup.
  • Password Recovery. MeshCentral2 will ask for your email address, will validate it and will use that address for password recovery if needed. This important feature was completely missing in v1.
  • Easy Installation. For people installing their own server, MeshCentral2 is built entirely in NodeJS and can be installed in minutes on a new server. This contrasts with the older ASP.net/IIS server that required a complicated installer.
  • Polymorphic Mesh Agent. While the mesh agent in MeshCentral1 was very portable, it required us to frequently recompile it and release updates to support new features. The new mesh agent paired with MeshCentral2 has a JavaScript runtime built-in. So many new features can be programmed and pushed to the agents with much less effort.
  • Mostly all JavaScript. MeshCentral1 required the developer to transition between JavaScript on the browser, C# on the server and C on the agent. MeshCentral2 is mostly JavaScript end-to-end except for the native C agent. This makes coding a lot simpler and makes sending data between browser-server-agent as easy as sending JSON.
  • Multitenancy. MeshCentral2 allows the server to be setup and host many MeshCentral web sites at once. Really nice when you want support many customers.

If you want to run your own MeshCentral2 server, instructions are available at:

http://www.meshcommander.com/meshcentral2

For any other information:

ylianst@gmail.com