MeshCentral #2 - a self hosted, open source Remote Management tool like TeamViewer, Bomgar, Anydesk

[Music] it's your open source advocate and i'm back with another video now this is one that i covered way back when i first started doing all these videos and it's called mesh central so it's a remote machine management software system that runs through your browser and it's really incredible so if you've been looking for a way to do remote support for your organization for your friends for your family for yourself with just your machines around your home this is really really a great tool and i've shown several of these over over the year mesh central remotely there's also guacamole which i've never gotten into and never shown but it's a pretty cool looking application as well but i like mesh central it's really great and they've done even even more to it since i showed it you know a year and a half or so ago and i thought it was really worth an update and the best thing is you can run this now in docker there are some folks that have that have made it where it runs in docker which is really really great as well so i i went out there and found a docker compose file that i liked from from one of the people that's done that and kind of spun it up and checked it out and it worked really well so i'm pretty excited to show this to you guys and basically getting installed is not going to take much you just need to have you know your system set up you need to have docker on it and then be ready to go so we're going to get into it right after this i want to say thank you to all of my subscribers and all of my patrons over at patreon seriously you guys make this so worth it for me to do these videos every week i really truly enjoy it and i just can't say thank you enough if you're enjoying these videos subscribe let youtube know that i'm doing a good job by subscribing to the channel plus you'll get notified when i have new videos coming out and finally if you're enjoying what i'm doing give it a like just click on that thumbs up and that way youtube knows that you like it and they'll pass it along to other people that might enjoy my content as well i really appreciate it thank you again let's get started i want to open up some channels for discussion so i've created this rocket chat server and i've got it mixed up with jitsi mead i've created a few channels already to start up some discussions but of course we can always open up more channels if you'd like to jump in and send me a direct message or just ask a question in one of the channels i'll be monitoring the system it'll be up and running i'm going to leave this up and going so that we can have a place where we can all come together and answer each other's questions and have good discussions and good conversations it's disgust.opensourcesawesome.com again that's disgust.opensourcesawesome.com i'll have the links in the show notes and the description okay so coming out of this out of the gate with mesh central you can run mesh central straight up on the hardware you do not have to use docker if you don't want to and there's instructions out there on how to do it and i've got a video from way back when i started on how to do it as well so i'll link that down in the description it's a little older you might want to go and double check and make sure the instructions are still the same but i think that they are i don't think they've changed it much and then here on the mesh central site the guy who makes it elon he's got lots of really great videos about how to use mesh central and how to install it and what you can do with it and it can really do a lot more than even i'm going to show you today but i'm going to help you get it set up and ready and running and today we're going to use docker for that which is which is always kind of a favorite of mine because it means that i can really put a lot of things on a single system that normally you would just be running a single server to do that thing and why use up an entire server for something that doesn't need it so i want to go here to this particular docker hub entry and i like the way that this person has done this and it says you know he's updated five days ago which is great so he's updating things now when you come here you're just going to see kind of the base information for what he's got going it's the same thing as you get over here on the github site so i always like to see if there's a link to github and i do go check out their github site to see if there's extra files that maybe i need to make things work so if you're ever trying to do this and you're like you don't want to tinker around with this try to do what brian did and just see if i can get it running check the github site if they have one when they do a docker compose or docker file to make sure that you're not missing some kind of configuration file or something like that in this case there is a config template but it actually comes down whenever you do the docker stuff so you can kind of just check it out and see if you see things that maybe you're like missing um this one's pretty straightforward i really like it pretty cool so we're going to start it from scratch so i've got my terminal up here in the background and i've got the the font enlarged a bit here i'm going to make it a little bigger so first thing we'll do is just create a folder to kind of hold all this in we're going to create one just called mesh central so it's super easy to identify oops i'm not gonna cd into it we're gonna make a directory for it come on brian wake up make directory mesh central and then we're gonna cd into mesh central now that we've got it and i'm just gonna clear that out and we'll keep the text up at the top of the screen for you now we're going to need a docker compose file so we're going to do nano docker hyphen compose.yml okay make sure you do that now you can use vi you can use vim you can use emacs you can use whatever you want i just use nano because it's simple then we're just going to grab basically this text and and this will be linked in the in the in the show notes in the description we're going to copy that we're going to go back to our terminal here and we're just going to paste it in with ctrl shift v like victor control shift v is what's going to paste into your terminal now there's a couple things we want to change here so i'm going to make this just a little bit bigger so that we can kind of see the stuff he's got some good comments in here that's one of the things i really like he puts in good comments so that you can figure out and understand what it is he's doing whenever you're you're kind of tackling these things so when you look at this it's going to use the mesh it's going to be called mesh central it's going to restart always which means if it fails it's going to try to restart so that's that's usually a good thing because you want your server to be up and running your container name is going to be mesh central and then it's going to be the image which is his image out there on on docker hub now he sets it up with the port 8086 and he points it to 443 and he kind of warns you like hey if you try to use port 80 mesh central is going to moan and it's going to try everything not to use it but but you can if you want to mess with it so he's kind of set it up already to save you a little trouble which i like so i'm just going to leave it like it is this is an open port on the system i'm going to use if it's not an open port for you just change this left side just change the left side right here don't change the right side but change this side and it'll it'll be fine okay now we're going to go down here and you're going to see this part that says host name so this is if you want to run it with a host name on your system so that could be you know my server.local it doesn't matter just just you can put in a hostname okay in my case i want to run this with an actual hostname um where it says hey i'm going to get this from the outside internet as well and then we'll set up some ssl certificates so we'll kind of go through the whole spiel here okay so i'm going to set this i'm going to call it mesh and troll at dot routemehome.org so this is my inside this is what goes into my home network my domain that i have set up with a wild card so if you don't have a domain set up you need to own that domain so i own this domain and i have a wild card entry that's just asterisk.routmhom.org that points to my home public ip address so that i can then just create kind of on the fly subdomains and they'll point to my home ip address which is awesome if you have a dynamic dns type address you can do the same thing probably so just just there's lots of ways to do it and if you want a video more on how to set that up let me know and i'll do that but i've done it a lot in the past so we do want to use a reverse proxy so i'm going to put this as a the ip address of my reverse proxy here inside my network and then it wants to know if we're going to do what what port that's going to be and it's going to be 443 for me if yours is different make sure to put a different port there and then iframe so it's just that defaults i'm not going to mess with that frame so i'm going to leave it allow new accounts so i'm going to set this to false because i want to be the only person that has an account on this system and i don't want anybody else to try to register or anything like that so so we'll set that default if you leave it true you're going to allow other people to register so if you're an i.t person and you're setting this up and you have a team and you want them to register on the on the mesh central site then you better leave that as true but i'm going to change it to false and then webrtc i want this to be true it's not officially supported according to this yet but it's coming which means that things will be much quicker if you can get a direct peer-to-peer connection going so i'm going to i'm going to turn it on and then he's got a couple of volumes that he's going to map here and it says dot slash which means where we run this docker compose command from and then a folder called mesh central and then he's got data and he's got user files so we just need to create a folder here called mesh central for that stuff to go into and i think we'll be pretty much done so i'm going to save my changes with ctrl o double check that it has the correct name hit enter to save and then control x to get out of nano and now we're going to make that second folder called mesh central so we have a folder mesh central and we're inside of it and we're creating another one called mesh central and if we do ls we'll see that and we have docker compose there and now really all we need to do is docker make sure we spell it right compose up dash d and it's going to grab the image which it already did for me for you it may run and it may take a minute you know it takes a minute to download the image i already had it because i practiced and ran through this before don't don't sweat it that it looks different if you see yours doing something different or if it takes longer to come up but you can see here mine says that it's done and it's and it's up so we can test this we can go to the ip address of my server which is 192.168.7.1 colon 8086. now i didn't put https on here i just typed in the ip address in the port and you're going to see it's probably going to fail and it did and there's a good reason for that um so we're going to go to https colon slash that same address and now you see i get this potential security risk ahead so i would have to accept this if i just wanted to use self-signed certificates to to be able to access mesh central from inside but i already told it that i'm going to be coming to it from a proxy so i need to go set up my proxy host so in this case i run nginx proxy manager here's my nginx proxy manager now this is running on the host that i gave it which is that 125 address so i'm in hosts and i'm going to click on add a host and i'm going to give it that name that i gave it inside there i'm going to hit tab and then i'm going to make sure this says https and then i'm going to put in the actual ip address of my server because it's a different server that i'm running on from the server that this nginx proxy manager is running on and then i'm going to tell 8086. i'm going to tell it cache assets block exploits websocket support because we turned on webrtc i'm going to click save so now i have my meshcentral.romyhome.org we're going to just click it and again it's going to come up and it's going to say hey you made it to this page good job so that's what it was expecting which is great so let me just close this before we continue i'll close that one too now i want to go get some let's encrypt certificates for it so i'm going to go over here and i'm going to hit edit and i'm going to go to ssl tab and i'm going to say request a new certificate i'm going to say force ssl and i'm going to say i agree and this is my email address i'm going to hit save this is going to go out and tell let's encrypt hey i want you to challenge my site here and make sure that it's valid and that i'm the owner of it and then give me some let's encrypt certificates for this actual site that i just set up this reverse proxy for so let's encrypt's gonna go okay let me check and see what i can do here it's gonna run through the challenge process and then eventually if this little thing goes away with no errors we should have a valid ssl certificate and if you look right here there's my lock and everything looks good and now we need to create my first account so i'm going to click on that little link so if you missed that right here on the login page there's this little link right here and i'll kind of let's see if we can blow that up right here and it says create one so we're going to click on that i'm going to put in the username that i want now the fields don't resize very nicely so i'm going to zoom back out a little bit here and my username is going to be this and my email is going to be that and i'm going to create a strong password here and a strong password again make sure they match and then we're going to say create account and it's going to ask me if i want to save that i don't and so it's a little bit warden that's okay i'm just going to say no and then i've got no devices but i'm in mesh central we're done we finished i mean that's probably one of the fastest installs we've ever done and we're set up and we're already actually running so mesh central is installed and now i just need to set up a couple of things inside of mesh central and mesh central's really incredible software so i want to go through a few things with you guys uh on it but first let me just get into the actual use of it so we need to create a device group and you can create multiple device groups so if you have a huge network or if you have a whole lot of different people that you're supporting with this kind of thing you can create different device groups and then group those devices and it makes it easier to find them so i'm just going to call this one home and you have two two choices here so if you're going to use the intel amt only no agent then you would click this one i don't do that i want the agent running on my machines because i use linux i use mac os i use bsd i don't use much windows at all i do have a windows virtual machine that i'll set up on here just so you guys can see how that works as well but there we're going to do that all through the agent we're not going to use it through amt so just leave it on that one if that's that's the way you want to go and then i'm going to say home machines i'm going to click ok and now you see you get this option here to add a device so first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to go because i'm logged in this is the the server that we just did and it doesn't have an ip address i mean it doesn't have a desktop it's just a server a ubuntu server so i could add this one but it's just going to give me terminal access to it so we'll do that in a minute but first i want to actually get into another machine so i'm going to open up a new terminal i'm going to say ssh brian at 192.168.7.125 and that's the machine that i run all of my uh other stuff out of where the enginex proxy manager is running so i'm logged into that one and i'll increase the font size there so you guys can kind of see what i'm doing and when we say add a device you're going to pick what is it so you have windows linux bsd linux bsd mac os binary apple mac os mobile device and then you have the uninstallers here so i'm going to go linux bsd and it's going to give me this little script to run so you can read through the script and kind of see what it's doing all right so you can kind of figure out like what's happening so it's pulling down a couple of shell scripts you can do all this stuff if you if you want to and double check it but this is how you add a device with the agent so i'm going to click copy right here i'm just going to close that and i'm going to go back to that machine that i just logged into which is right here and i'm going to just paste in that command and i'm going to hit enter and it's going to ask me for my super user password and then once i give it that it's going to take just a second to pull that stuff down run through the install of the agent and it's done so if we come back to mesh central it'll refresh on its own as you just saw and then there's my machine and that's the name of the machine and you can see the agent is powered so we can just click on the machine and we get a whole lot of information right here about the device itself we can see that it's got the ip address and it says that it's a linux 64-bit until yeah the intel at me i don't have it installed or activated that's fine operating system is zornos 15.3 which is correct my active user is brian user consent so this is pretty nice this is some new stuff since the last time i did this so if you want to set up user consent it says none right now which means i can just jump on and take control of desktop so i'll show you desktop and then we just click on connect and there's the desktop and of course i need to hit the space bar to load up type in my password to that machine and you can of course make this larger by maximizing the browser you know maximizing inside of here so you can see this this machine needs to be rebooted so i can restart it right now or i can restart it later so i'm going to restart later because i want to keep using the machine for a little bit and using it for demo here but this is it i'm controlling the desktop there's the there's the zorn menu there's you know anything i need to do on this machine i can now do right through the user interface just like i was logged into it sitting in front of it so i'm just going to disconnect for now and we're going to go back to desktop information and there's quite a bit of stuff here so there's actions and you can see like what i want to do to this thing do i want to wake it up do i want to run commands i want to sleep it reset it power off or uninstall the agent so you have a few things here that you can do right from the ui which is really great i really like that quite a bit then you have notes so you can add notes about these machines so again if you're an i.t administrator if you're a person running a support site you know and you have a whole lot of machines you're trying to keep notes about those machines because you want to remember information about things you've done before certain settings you may have set on purpose issues you may have run across in the past and how you fix them so that's a really nice feature to add notes about it and then logging the events so if you have an event you can log that as well you can message so you can message a a thing to the client i believe so let's see let's try this um let's do hey need some help all right so now we're looking at this on no machine this is the same desktop we just saw and i'm going to go back to my browser and i'm going to send this message and let's go see what it looks like over here on no machine you can see it says hey need some help and i can say no or yes okay so you don't get anything back on the agent side so this is pretty nice so if you have a get if you have an ip administrator who doesn't actually have an account you can still invite them to actually see this screen so you can put in the guest name the type what we're going to do starting now how long they'll have it you know 15 minutes 16 hours you know whatever you want there that's pretty cool and then prompt for consents and then you can say notify only that you're going to do this to the other user and so that's pretty cool so we can hit cancel on that for now so you've got a lot of stuff right here just under general then of course you saw the desktop sharing we also have terminal so we can just access the terminal instead we can say cd ls and then there you go and we can say cd slash home brian ls and then there's there's brian's files right there so i can i can do a lot of stuff right through this terminal which is pretty great uh just managing it then we've got files so if i want to share files if i want to send if i want to receive things like that so you get kind of this file explorer so i can see these files i can go into home and again i can go into brian and then i can say oh yeah you know i need to get something from there and i need to move it over and then i could also probably upload files as well i must say yeah so there's upload so i can pick a file that i want to send over and and put it in brian's home folder on the other machine as well which is really really a great feature when you start talking about having to do any kind of remote support we've got events let's go back let's disconnect that we've got events so we can see what kind of events are happening with this particular machine that we've got set up we've got details so we've got all kinds of information here about this machine and all the internet interface stuff we've got just all kinds of information that this this pools and that we can take a look at which is really really spectacular from a from a piece of software that's open source and free like this and then you have the console so if there's anything going on in the console you'll see it here and then uh agent action so you can say use the default server core create the core upload repositor upload recovery core so you've got quite a bit of stuff that you can do through the console as well from an administrative standpoint so that's really what it looks like when you add a machine we're going to add let's add one more here just to to i said i have a windows machine let me go start it up here give me one second all right while that machine is getting booted up we're going to go ahead and go through some other stuff so here you have my account info and there's some important stuff in here to understand so manage authenticator app so you can set up two-factor authentication if you want to and you would scan this qr code with your two-factor authentication application and that would give you a second factor of authentication in order to be able to log into this system i think this is a really awesome feature and it's something that anybody who's actually serious about keeping their machine secured should use so so be aware that that's there and you probably want to set that up you do want to grab these secondary codes just in case something comes up and you need to use them so you can also manage your security keys as well you can view previous logins which i don't have any we just logged in this first time of course so you can enable web notifications and you see it pops up up here to give you notifications so you can just say allow notifications when you do that then you have notification settings what do you want to be notified or how do you want to be notified so i want to sound yes um display device group name yeah let me know what it is desktop connections or device connections device disk connections you know all the things you may want to know about that are happening whenever you're looking at this now depending on how big your fleet is you may not want to get notifications about all these things so it just kind of depends so you can change your email address right here if you don't like the email address you put in or you want to use a new one you can do that right there you can of course change your password and you can delete the account if you want to then you have your device groups so right here you can add new device groups as well through this my account section here you've got the my events so the things that you've been doing in kind of an audit format right here you've got my files so you can set up files that you can then upload and use for other things whenever you're doing different uh different tasks on different machines you've got the user so if you're allowing more than just yourself then you can see all the users here and you can manage your users as well and then finally you've got your server information kind of what's going on so in this case the server the available memory is 3.2 gigabytes it's yeah so it's use three 3.2 gigabytes with 3.8 gigabytes total and then here you can see the cpu load which is pretty much nil and then you can check out user accounts as one user sessions one device groups one and and so on so you get a little bit of information about the system here and you can say i want to download the server backup i want to restore server backup check the server version or show the server error log you can go here to stats so if you want to see stats it'll give you graphs and things like that so over here you can kind of check and see what's happening you again have the server console and then you have trace so if you want to do tracing you can say i want to see cookies message dispatcher main server messages so there's a lot of stuff here that you can actually do and get information about so it's pretty interesting as well clips are http headers i don't know if this will even show anything yeah not right now but it says it's tracing http server headers there we go there's something that goes off so that's cool okay so you've got a lot of stuff here kind of in these in these settings that go down the left side of the pane and of course this is where the the money and the magic happens so let me check my machine here on startup all right i got my windows virtual machine up and running here so and i'm going to go to add a device all right so i'm on my windows machine and i know this is really small i apologize for that but here's the actual um installer so i'm just going to double click on this thing and you'll see windows protected this pc which is always great so if you click on that little link it usually just gives you this run in anyways i you know microsoft just i don't understand it but okay they're trying to protect you from yourself i suppose and it says it's checking for viruses i want to install this and yes and it looks like it finished so let's go back to here oh yeah there it is in the background we're done there's my desktop so let's click on it and let's go to desktop and let's connect and there it is now i have control of my windows pc it's a little bit jittery but again it's running in a virtual machine not expecting it to be super performance or anything like that but we can click on the little arrows here to kind of expand this up make it a little bit larger and you can see here now i've got everything kind of working the way that i would want it to work now i'm going to close back out or i'm disconnect from this i'm going to go back to my machine overview we'll go down here and there's this which is mesh command there's interfaces and then there's no vnc so if i go to interfaces i can kind of see all of the information about this actual machine i can see what it looks like what all the numbers are i can see that there's an ip address on my normal subnet that's great here if i go to mesh commander again you know download mesh central so this is something we've kind of done already and then here with no vnc i don't think this is going to work uh it warns you in firefox that you just tried to do something so we'll just say allow that so it's going to try to open up with vnc of course it's not going to work so we can say connect but it's there's not a vnc client on that windows machine so it's probably not going to do it we can see if it's prompting us for anything i don't think it was so we can give up on that we just close that tab down we're done so you see that you can actually manage and monitor and use these things use use mesh central for a windows based machine as well which is you know quite useful especially if you have a lot of people using windows in your network or as clients so we've got quite a few settings here so you can say quality you know i want the quality to be 30 percent scaling let's do 87.5 percent and then let's do fast okay so you see it you can see the difference in the screen i'm sure it changed quite a bit but if i open up something here um like the file explorer maybe it'll be a little bit quicker now yeah it still kind of redraws pretty slow i mean windows never really great on any kind of like remote thing in my opinion but it lets you get the job done if you need to control the machine for some reason and it's pretty easy to access it so i'm going to disconnect one more time and i'm going to go back over here to the desktop and i'm going to go to this setup here and you remember we talked about the user consent so we're going to change this to say notify user okay so now i'm going to go back and i'm going to go to the desktop i'm going to say connect and then let's go look at this side and you see down here and you can see it on the other screen hey it says i just started a remote desktop session to your machine so you can see this so this is great because your end users want to know when you're connected right this is this is important for them to understand that you're getting connected to them and using their machine to do something so i think it's a really cool feature that they added since i was on last time i don't believe that was there a couple years ago when i did this so we're going to disconnect again and then we'll go back and let's go check out the other things we have so there's also prompt for user consent and then show the connection toolbar we'll add it in a second and just kind of see the difference as we go so we'll go back in hit connect so this time you see it doesn't connect right away it says it's waiting for the user so i've got to jump over here and it prompts me and it says hey somebody's wanted to access your machine is that okay yeah that's fine and now if i go back i should see that the machine is up and you see it gives us the notification there and there we go we've got access again so again a really nice feature if you're trying to give your users some control over whether or not you're connecting to the machines which is great it'd be nice on the agent side to be able to say yeah i need them to go ahead and prompt me before they just access my machine but i don't know that that's there yet we'll we'll look at it here in a second and see what we see um let's go back is that still open yeah okay it's not i don't think yeah it is so we'll disconnect and then let's go back one more time and let's change this to the last one which says show connection and now we'll go and we'll click it one more time and you see it's waiting for our consent and we'll give it and we should get the little prompt and it should say show the connection toolbar yeah so here's the desktop with b mcgonag so there it is and i can click x so let's see make sure we're seeing it we are and then as the user on the windows side i can click on the little x and that should yeah that kicked you out so that let me kick you out of the machine and you'll have to ask again if you can join so not not bad now of course you're in control of whether you're not whether or not you have to ask in the first place so you could just go turn that off right here but it's a nice feature to add that and give your users some some control over what you're doing which is great okay so i didn't want to finish the video without letting you guys know this but i came back to relog into my mesh central today and every time i kept putting in my two-factor authentication token it kept telling me it was invalid and then i also had locked myself out by putting in the wrong username and password several times so be aware that there is a limit set on that so if you do that too many times it'll lock you out it's only for 10 minutes so you got to wait 10 minutes come back and try again and once i got the right username password again then i was able to log in but the issue is that with my two-factor authentication that i set up i scanned everything i tested it made sure it worked of course because it wouldn't set up if you didn't but when i went in today it kept giving me a failed login attempt so i had to go into my terminal and actually log into the host machine and make sure that it had the right time zone set or that at least my client machine and my my host machine had the right time zones or the same time zone set um you know your phone as well so make sure everything's working in the same time zone if you don't do that then those otp applications will tend to have the wrong information for you and and not be calculating things correctly because they calculate things off of time along with a bunch of other keys and factors but definitely date and time are important so if you don't have that set up correctly it's going to create problems in the long run so i kind of wanted to show you what i did so i jumped into my server i said date and then i noticed right away that this was way off because it's looking at utc and it's not looking at my correct time zone so this is the command right here that you want to use to set the time zone at least inside of ubuntu um probably ubuntu debian you know any of the debian ubuntu based systems so you're going to use sudo and then time date ctl altogether set hyphen time zone and then use your time zone now if you're not sure what your time zone is there's information out there on the internet on how to see the list of time zones but it's really not that difficult so you can just kind of jump out here there's a page here and i'll link this page in the show notes as well so you guys can find this but if you want to see what the time zones are you can just do time ctl time date ctl list time zones so if we just highlight that and we copy it into here it should give us all of the possible time zones and you can just page through this so you see it starts with africa and you can either hit the down arrow key to go one at a time or you can use your page up and page down to also go through those but you can just jump uh through here and kind of find the time zones and how it's written for your location so most of the time it's country slash you know city whatever your kind of closest city is if you're not in a major metropolitan area i am i am technically nowhere near chicago i am all the way across the country from chicago but we are in the same time zone so that's the one that i use so that's how you do that it's really not difficult at all um to get that set up but just know if you're having issues with your with your otp or you haven't set those things up if you don't want to have issues when you if you want to install mesh central and docker and stuff make sure that the host machine has the time zone set correctly make sure that your machine has the time zone set correctly and make sure that your phone is also using the correct time zone or it could definitely create problems i hope you enjoyed this if you did like subscribe tell your friends about it so they can come along on the journey with us and i'll talk to you next time [Music] you

Channel: Awesome Open Source

Views: 11,457

Keywords: open, source, opensource, open-source, self, hosted, selfhosted, self-hosted, free, libre, software, server, web, internet, browser, linux, mac, macos, os x, windows, microsoft, ios, android, desktop, vps, tutorial, how to, setup, installation, instructions, cli, command line, terminal, interface, open source software, open source news, open source projects, remote desktop, teamviewer, anydesk, gotoassist, gta, bomgar, chrome remote desktop, vnc, remote access, meshcentral, mesh central, remotely

Id: pGBIjBGqlfI

Length: 34min 12sec (2052 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 20 2021