I’ve been using MeshCentral for a couple of weeks and I am very impressed, the agent is very small and it works well, although I initially set it up on a Ubuntu machine following their instructions. I thought it would be handy to configure on my NAS drive as this is running all the time.

I’ve configured this with Docker-Compose but I’m sure there are probably easier ways to accomplish the same thing.

Installing Docker

First thing we need to install Docker on the NAS which is relatively straight forward, we go to Package Center, search for Docker and click Install.

Creating the required files

I created the two files from the MeshCentral docker github page here, my files are below

.env file

NODE_ENV=production
HOSTNAME=meshcentral.phm.pw
USE_MONGODB=false
# set to your reverse proxy IP if you want to put meshcentral behind a reverse proxy 
REVERSE_PROXY=true
REVERSE_PROXY_TLS_PORT=443
IFRAME=false
ALLOW_NEW_ACCOUNTS=false
WEBRTC=true
ALLOWPLUGINS=false
LOCALSESSIONRECORDING=false
MINIFY=true
 

docker-compose.yml

version: "3"
services:
 
  meshcentral:
    restart: always
    container_name: meshcentral
    hostname: meshcentral
    # use the official meshcentral container
    image: ghcr.io/ylianst/meshcentral:latest
    ports:
      # MeshCentral will moan and try everything not to use port 80, but you can also use it if you so desire, just change the config.json according to your needs
      - 8086:443
    env_file:
      - .env
    volumes:
      # config.json and other important files live here. A must for data persistence
      - ./meshcentral/data:/opt/meshcentral/meshcentral-data
      # where file uploads for users live
      - ./meshcentral/user_files:/opt/meshcentral/meshcentral-files
      # location for the meshcentral-backups - this should be mounted to an external storage
      - ./meshcentral/backup:/opt/meshcentral/meshcentral-backups
      # location for site customization files
      - ./meshcentral/web:/opt/meshcentral/meshcentral-web

I then uploaded these two files to the docker folder on the NAS using the File Station app, I also created the folder structure for MeshCentral in the docker folder to match their instructions as so

| - meshcentral/        # this folder contains the persistent data
  | - data/             # MeshCentral data-files
  | - user_files/       # where file uploads for users live
  | - web/              # location for site customization files
  | - backup/           # location for the meshcentral-backups
| - .env                # environment file with initial variables
| - docker-compose.yml

Enabling SSH access

To be able to run docker-compose we need SSH access to the NAS, this is enabled in Control Panel / Terminal and enable SSH.

Connecting with SSH and starting MeshCentral.

As I’m using Windows 10 i went to the command prompt and ran the following

ssh nasadmin@nasipaddress 
cd volume1/docker/
sudo docker-compose up -d
sudo docker-compose logs meshcentral

Although docker-compose installed MeshCentral fine, I could see from the logs I was getting an error “meshcentral | ERROR: Unable to parse /opt/meshcentral/meshcentral-data/config.json.” I quickly looked at the config file in meshcentral/data/config.json and could see the sessionkey line had got messed up somehow. The easiest thing for me to do was just to edit the file to fix the error, the line appeared as

"sessionKey": "4aN%oGCwGQ]Q]B[qe[%`WkOwonou"_sessionKey": "MyReallySecretPassword1"U]",

Not really too sure what happened there, as I did this before and it worked first time, however, I changed the line as follows

"_sessionKey": "MyReallySecretPassword1",

The underscore at the start means it is not used, so will generate a random sessionkey each time it starts.

That was it, MeshCentral was now accessible from the NAS webpage by going to https://nasname:8086 but I still need to set up the reverse proxy on the NAS to allow connections on port 443 and with a proper SSL certificate. If you are happy to leave it on port 8086 you just need to change the line in the config.json file to say

"aliasPort": 8086,

So the agents you deploy will know the correct port to use.

Setting up Mesh Central for Reverse Proxy.

Firstly we need to stop meshcentral to edit the config file, from the NAS you can go to the docker application then click Containers, Actions and then Stop

Or in an SSH session you can type “docker stop meshcentral”

Then you can either use File Station to download the config.json file from /docker/meshcentral/data to edit it locally and upload once changed or use SSH with “sudo vi /volume1/docker/meshcentral/data/config.json” –

The lines we want to change are

    "TLSOffload": true,
...

    "certUrl": "meshcentral.phm.pw"

So the entire config looks like

{
  "$schema": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Ylianst/MeshCentral/master/meshcentral-config-schema.json",
  "settings": {
    "plugins":{"enabled": false},
    "_mongoDb": null,
    "cert": "meshcentral.phm.pw",
    "_WANonly": true,
    "_LANonly": true,
    "_sessionKey": "MyReallySecretPassword1",
    "port": 443,
    "_aliasPort": 443,
    "_redirPort": 80,
    "_redirAliasPort": 80,
    "AgentPing": 60,
    "TLSOffload": true,
    "SelfUpdate": false,
    "AllowFraming": false,
    "WebRTC": true
  },
  "domains": {
    "": {
      "_title": "MyServer",
      "_title2": "Servername",
      "minify": true,
      "NewAccounts": false,
      "localSessionRecording": false,
      "_userNameIsEmail": true,
      "certUrl": "meshcentral.phm.pw"
    }
  },
  "_letsencrypt": {
    "__comment__": "Requires NodeJS 8.x or better, Go to https://letsdebug.net/ first before>",
    "_email": "[email protected]",
    "_names": "myserver.mydomain.com",
    "production": false
  }
}

Configuring the NAS for reverse proxy.

On the NAS admin page, we go to Control Panel / Login Portal / Advanced / Reverse Proxy and create, and configure as follows

The first three are to allow websockets, and the last three to allow meshcentral to know the real IP address of the clients. MeshCentral suggests longer timeout which is done in the advanced tab.

Finally, we need to configure the certificate on the NAS, for me I have my domain name meshcentral.phm.pw pointing towards my NAS´s external IP Address and have forwarded port 80 and 443.

On the NAS we go to Control Panel / Certificates and Add, and enter the following

Assuming you have the DNS records and port forwarding is done correctly, this will get a certificate, next you need to click settings and make sure the reverse proxy connection is set to use the correct certificate.

That should be it, I can now connect to https://meshcentral.phm.pw which will redirect to my docker container and work.

Good luck! The last part of this blog was written very quicky so please comment below if you notice any errors or something is not working for you.