In one of the most significant announcement in the last year, and one that deeply changes the inner workings of mesh, starting yesterday we released initial support for WebRTC in Meshcentral. For people who are not yet familiar, WebRTC is a set of open standards supported in Chrome, Firefox and Opera that allows browsers to directly communicate to one another enabling audio, video and data channels directly from a browser to another. Meshcentral takes WebRTC to a new level by allowing direct Browser-to-Machine communication. You can now use Meshcentral.com to setup a secure, authenticated channel between a browser and a remote machine to do remote desktop, terminal, file access and much more. When used, traffic will no longer flow thru Meshcentral, but directly between the browser and the target device.
In the last month, we proceeded to implement our very own WebRTC stack that now comes standard with v1.78 of the mesh agent. The new stack adds about 15k to the agent binary, is fully Intel built and implements support for all required standards: STUN/ICE/dTLS/RCTP/WebRTC. Since it’s for machine communication, the new stack supports only WebRTC data channels and is built into every Processor/OS agents we have. So, you can perform efficient remote desktop session to a PC or laptop, or launch a web terminal session to an Intel Galileo or Raspberry Pi. We support WebRTC across the board in everything from Win8 to WinXP, Linux, Yocto on x86, MIPS, ARM. From big servers to internet-of-things. As we roll this out, users should see improved performance from Meshcentral. For people running their own Meshcentral servers, the amount of traffic relayed should start to drop, making Meshcentral servers more cost effective to run.
Firefox, Chrome and Opera users with the latest Mesh agent and browser will see the new “Direct Connect” on the desktop, terminal and file tabs. Pressing it to attempt a WebRTC connection to the target device. Mesh agents will be automatically updated, but some may need to be re-installed to fix Windows firewall rules. The normal connection mode routed thru Meshcentral is not going away and users always have the option to fall back to this mode if needed. We have a demonstration video of WebRTC here.
As always, comments and feedback appreciated,
Ylian Saint-Hilaire
meshcentral.com/info
Immagine icona:
