Last night I updated the Javascript VNC client called noVNC that you can use along with Meshcentral.com, and now, it supports Intel AMT hardware KVM! So, if you happen to have a computer that has Intel AMT 6.0 of higher that is properly configured with hardware KVM and setup on Meshcentral.com, you can perform Hardware KVM from within any modern web browser!

To do this, just click on the device and select the "VNC/RDP/SSH" link at the bottom. Keep the selections to "noVNC" and port "5900" and click on "Intel AMT" and OK. You can then type in the Intel AMT VNC password and connect. No, to make this possible, Meshcentral.com is going to use another computer on your network as a relay, so you need to have to least two computers on that local network for this to work. This said, this solution will work thru proxies, NAT's and firewalls, so it's really handy.

This is pretty big news since I have been wanting to support hardware KVM from any web browser for a long time. I just demoed this feature to my summer intern, rebooting a computer and having the entire boot process show up within the web browser. Really cool!

Enjoy!
Ylian
meshcentral.com

And now for something completely weird. I saw a recent TED video on the opportunities of a 404 error page. Apparently there are even competitions for the best 404 error page. Given that I am working on my own web site, I figured I needed to get a better page not found. So here we go... the new Meshcentral 404 Page Not Found error!

Ylian
meshcentral.com

Over the weekend I improved the full screen support for the built-in Meshcentral.com remote desktop feature in two ways. Before I get to that, for people who don't know, Meshcentral.com allows you to take control of your remote desktop from within a web browser. So, from anywhere in the world you log in and with a few clicks, you can take control of your computer remotely. Well, when looking at your remote computer within a browser, it's useful to be able to re-size the browser and use as much screen area as possible.

The first improvement I did is to build the normal view and full view within the same HTML page. Now you can connect to your remote computer and switch between view modes without loosing your connection. The icon to do this is on the upper right on the picture below.

Second, I added support for true full screen using the HTML5 full screen API's supported in FireFox and Chrome. When in "full mode" there is a new "Full Screen" button that is available for supported browsers. It will make the page truly go full screen on the client. In both FireFox and Chrome, you press ESC key to drop back out of full screen. So, in this mode, I added a new "ESC" button in case you need to send the ESC key to the remote computer.

In general, this remote desktop within a browser feature is really cool. I hope these improvements will make it a bit better.

Ylian
meshcentral.com

Well, we just got ourself a new feature! With Meshcentral.com, you can access the command prompt of any Windows, Mac OSX and Linux computers from our web based terminal. Works in any browser. It's useful when you need to do advanced operations. It's especially useful for Linux machines where the command prompt is really powerful. So, the new feature is that you can now drag & drop a text document, up to 10k in length into the terminal and the text will be "typed" into the terminal window just like if you typed it on the keyboard. You can how have a bunch of script files ready to go and, when you need them, just drap and drop on the terminal to save you a lot of typing!

This feature working in FireFox, Chrome and Safari. It should work in IE10 when that comes out, but for right now, no IE support.

Enjoy!
Ylian
meshcentral.com

One of the big features of Meshcentral.com is it's remote file manager. Being able to manage, upload and download files using any web browser is pretty powerful. Today, we improved this feature a lot by adding drag & drop support. You can now take one or more files from a folder on your local computer and drag & drop them into the web browser. The selected files will then be uploaded one by one to the target computer. This feature is especialy nice since, in the past, you could only select one file to upload at a time. This is the first time you can drag a bunch of them all at once. Note that this feature works in: FireFox, Chrome and Safari. It does not yet work in Internet Explorer.

Now, I can't take all the credit for this feature, my new summer intern Sathvik just got started on Monday and this is this first feature to make it on the site.

All in all, this makes easier than ever to remotely access your files remotely and over the web. I hear lots of stories of people that use this feature to access home files while traveling.

Update (5/12/2012): When you use the "upload" button you can now select multiple files and all files will be uploaded at once. Just put in the feature now.

Enjoy!
Ylian
meshcentral.com

In my last blog I talked about adding iPad Retina display to Meshcentral.com. Well, I made two more improvements on that same topic. First, the new high DPI support now includes Internet Explorer. If you set the zoom factor on IE to 150% or more and go to Meshcentral.com, you will see the high resolution graphics. Seconds, I expended support for high DPI displays and iPad retina displays to the Meshcentral.com mobile application. It's accessible at: https://meshcentral.com/m.

On iPhones and iPad's, you can go to that URL and "Add to Homescreen". You will get a high resolution iOS icon, a splash screen and a really nice web application to monitor your devices. The application looks just wonderful on the new iPad's display.

Ylian
meshcentral.com

In the last week, I got myself a "new iPad" with retina display. It's really a wonderful display and moving forward, there probably will be a lot more high DPI displays available for tablets and laptops. When visiting web sites, the fonts and CSS elements of the web page look sharp, but the images are a little washed out because they are stretched to the higher DPI. Well, I just spent a few hours working on improving Meshcentral's look on the new iPad. When detected, higher resolution images are used and I changed the top logo on the site to something that would render better.

The result is a really good looking web site on the new iPad. I can tell what images have been updates and which have not. I have not gone thru the entire site, but many of the more important element have been upgraded. In the future, HTML will have to include some way to detect high-DPI displays, for now, the new iPad is detected specifically, so only that device will get the improved graphics on that page. Moving forward, I will look at opportunities to extend this feature to all displays that can benefit. Also, for any other device, the normal graphics are loaded, so the pages are not any larger in size.

Enjoy!
Ylian
meshcentral.com

For a long time now, Meshcentral.com has been able to handle having a mesh of computers shared between many web accounts. Sadly, there was no good way to add and remove user access to a mesh. You had to use the MeshConnector tool which was Windows only, etc. Well things just god a lot better! I added the new account add/remove feature so you can now create a mesh and control which user get access to it. You can also set the user privilages: "administrator" and "viewer".

To add user access, go to the account tab, click on a mesh. At the bottom of the page you see the list of users that can view or access computers on this mesh. Click the add link to add new users or the trash icon to remove them.

Just make sure to grant access to the correct user. Also, I don't have more granular access control, so you can't grant access to only one computer, just the entire mesh. But hopefully, I will be working on that in the future.

Enjoy!
Ylian
meshcentral.com

A few weeks back I started on a new quest to build a Windows 8 Metro application for Meshcentral.com. At least, learn about how to build such an app and get ready for when developers can submit free applications on the Microsoft Store. Well, I worked a few days using Javascript libraries I already use for Meshcentral's web site and the Android and iPhone/iPad applications and developed my first Windows8 Metro Application. There is still plenty to work on, but I started running around Intel showing it off and figured I would make a small video showing it off.

The video demonstrates the application on an EXO-PC tablet with the latest Windows 8 Consumer Preview and Visual Studio 2011 BETA. I started with a basic project that is provided with VS2011 and hacked it quite a bit. The result is very nice. Still bugs to work out but the speed is decent and it actually does work.

This app is not yet available to the public, but hopefully the Microsoft Store will open soon.

Youtube video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJPVOAoBYzo

Ylian
Meshcentral.com

After many requests, yesterday I finally looked at offering a new fullscreen feature for the web based remote desktop on Meshcentral.com. As many of you already know, Meshcentral's agents have built-in remote desktop capability on Windows, MacOS and some variants of Linux. The remote desktop is build from the ground up to be web based, so a modern web browser can take control of the display, mouse and keyboard of a remote computer.

For a long time, the remote desktop on the web page would scale down the desktop image to fit the smaller width of the 960 pixel web pages Meshcentral uses, if you have a large screen on the local and remote machines, this was not great. Well, today there is a new full screen button on the remote desktop page and you can go into full screen. It's the same speed as before because it was always sending all of the data anyway, but you now get to see all that extra data.

Enjoy!
Ylian
meshcentral.com

Quick note to point out that I added a few days ago the last modified date and time of files and directories in the web based remote file browser in Meshcentral.com. Some have been asking for this feature since they deal with loads of log files and need to know which file is the latest one, etc. This change is supported in Mesh Agent v.1.55 which is not available on all platforms yet, but as I compile new platforms, this feature will get wider support. As of now, Windows, Linux x86 and MIPS are version 1.55. I will try to compile Mac OS X today along with others this next week.

In other news, most of my time has been spent working on the back-end server. So much to do, each day the server works a lot better with improved diagnostics and features. Nothing that anyone else can use, but it's far from the days where the server looked like a pile of lumber & duck-tape.

Below, a screen shot of the remote file manager with the new date/time on the right.

Ylian
meshcentral.com

I am keeping up the bug fixing and development on meshcentral.com, the remote computer monitoring and management web site. Today, I am very glad to announce that I just added RDP support to the site. You can now start a Windows Terminal Session from Meshcentral with just a few clicks, as long as the client computer is also Widnows. To make this happen, click on a device and hit the "VNC/RDP" link at the bottom. Then, select the RDP viewer and hit ok. You will then have a link to launch the RDP viewer and connect. Note that this works by using the RDP client built-into your own computer along with mesh routing code. The good news is, this works behind HTTPS proxies & firewalls, in fact both the client and target computers can be behind firewalls and it all works. If you are using Chrome or Firefox, you will need the "Microsoft .NET Assistant Add-in" to make this work.

Now for the technical details: I just discovered Microsoft's ClickOnce... it's a way to package up .NET binaries so that it can be started from a browser. When clicking on the RDP link, the browser downloads and runs a .NET TCP traffic routing tool, the Meshcentral also creates an encrypted routing cookie that is passed to the router. After the routing code is run, it in turn launches the RDP client and gets it going. RDP connects back to the router that forwards the connection to the Meshcentral and then to the target. I tried it with a few computers and it's quite fast, RDP is very efficient.

Enjoy! Feedback appreciated.
Ylian
https://meshcentral.com/

A few weeks back I went on eBay and got myself two Pogoplug devices. Very nice little media and file sharing devices, you plug storage in the USB ports and you get access to the data anywhere on the internet. The devices are not expensive at all and very functional. One of the things that interested me in the device is that you can enable SSH on them, login and install and run more software. Of course, the Meshcentral peer-to-peer agent would be a great target for such a device. You can leave your Pogoplug on all the time and then, use it as a low-power presence on the network to wake up other computers, monitor sleeping Intel AMT computers, etc. Best of all, you can use both Meshcentral along with the original Pogoplug software.

So, earlier today I downloaded the proper cross-compiler. I am really getting the hang of this, it took me about an hour to compile the mesh agent and get it running on the device! I also added the new mesh agent to the list of available agents on Meshcentral.com. Now, this is not for everyone just yet, you need to have a good idea what you are doing with Linux and the command prompt. I also did not research how to auto-start the mesh agent yet when the device boots up. Regardless, enable SSH on the Pogoplug web site in the settings and security menu, then I log in and remount the root file system and create a new folder with these commands:

mount -o rw,remount /
mkdir /usr/local/mesh
cd /usr/local/mesh

I am then ready to cut & paste the agent download and launch code from the Meshcentral.com account page (hit the Install link). After about a minute, the device will show up on Meshcentral.com and you can access file, get the command prompt, etc. Obviously, no remote desktop available.

That's it for now. Have fun with your new Pogoplug features!

Ylian
meshcentral.com

One of the problems I have been facing over the last few months was around the Mac OSX mesh agent. It just did not work right and so, over the last two weeks, I really made a big effort to improve it. Today, I released version 1.54 of the agent that seems to work much better. First, the remote desktop feature is back into the mesh agent. It's been out of over two months. So you get the same, entirely web based remote desktop that is already available on Linux and Windows. The mesh agent is also improved with all the latest features and bug fixes.

One of them problems the MacOSX agent still has it that it can't seem to resolve the DNS name of meshcentral.com correctly. So in this version and for MacOSX only, the IP address is hard coded into the mesh agent.  I will need to work to figure out that is causing this problem.

Anyway, Mac users, please try the latest agent and let me know what you think!

Ylian
meshcentral.com

With this post, I want to cover how Meshcentral.com powers up sleeping computers. As many of you know, you can go on the web site, see all your computers and select one or many and remotely powered them off, reset them, etc. These operations are fairly simple, just tell the mesh agent to instruct the operating system to do the operation. The real magic comes when you want to wake a system back up. I use this operation myself to wake up my Microsoft Home Server which is set to go to sleep after an hour.

To remotely wake a computer, the web site can't just hop in a cab, go to the computer's location and press the power button... but almost all desktop computers sold in the last 10 years support "wake-on-lan", also know as the "magic packet". Your are very likely to have this on your computer if, when you power your computer down, your Ethernet port is still blinking. Meshcentral has two requirements to get wake working. You need another mesh computer on the same network powered on, and you need your computer to have wake-on-lan enabled.

The first requirement is required since, in order to get passed the home router, there needs to be a mesh agent acting as the relay. The relay node can be a full computer, a laptop, a plugpc, router or android device. As long as it runs the mesh agent and belong to your account, you are set. If you have more than one, even better.

The second requirement is also important since, by default Wake-on-LAN is often disabled. You may need to go into the BIOS and enable it, also in Microsoft Windows, go in the device manager, go in the properties of your network card, power management tab and enable it. I suggest also selecting "Only allow a magic packet to wake the computer" because if you don't any packet that hits a listening port with wake the computer (it's called wake on pattern) and it causes the computer of wake up too often.

Well, that is it. If you meet these two requirements, your computer will wake up, even from a full S5 power off using Meshcentral.com or the Meshcentral mobile application.

Have fun!
Ylian
meshcentral.com