Are you a MeshCentral user from Germany?

[NewUserfromDE]

This is an early attempt to find MeshCentral users in Germany.
(I will repeat this after a certain time or if there will be better suited possibilities to find them within the MeshCentral community.)

My goal is NOT to build a german community. I made bad experiences when splitting an international open source community into national communities - this just divides and weakens community power, when not carefully done. Almost always it's done quick and dirty.

But with many projects there are problems which can best be locally solved. These things for me are:

1. networking with other MeshCentral admins in Germany
2. networking with other companies in Germany, that use MeshCentral
3. brainstorming about sharing costs for code signing certificates and so on

In theory I'm also interested in german speaking users, but since I'm also focusing on money and law, this would not be ideal. For example Switzerland has no Euro and is not part of the EU (laws) and Austria is another country with slightly other laws.

Please notice that I have already once founded a german open source "Verein" (registered association) for example, so this thread here is no hobby question ;-)

If you answer, please tell:

• country (Germany, Austria, Switzerland ...)
• if you are:
  • a) admin or end user (do you run a MeshCentral server yourself)
  • b) company / commercial (do you use of MeshCentral in a company or with a commercial goal)
  • c) interested in "investing" / sharing costs (e.G. buying a code signing certificate or founding a MeshCentral Verein)
  • or some combination of a, b, c ;-)

[simpsonetti]

Germany, in special lower saxony, so we say "moin" :)
"admin" for this part
"company" research center
it depends on what special thing. I don't have an idea if we in our company forming are allowed to spent. (it's a longer story...)

Networking here in Germany would be nice and of course, no community split should happen.
But i think in focusing in groups could be more effiency in pushing new features, strategies etc.

[NewUserfromDE]

Moin, NRW here. Until there are enough users from Germany I have no special plans yet =) But feel free to contact me for admin things in the meanwhile (I use Ubuntu and Hetzner). You seem to use Intel AMT. I don't have AMT hardware, to me MeshCentral is important as a general remote administration platform for mainly Windows clients. Will you attend the or one of the community online meetings?

[simpsonetti]

i have here Intel AMT (it's now called Intel vPro?) hardware, but i'm still testing.
I have mainly Windows, but there are some Linux and on my dev-Meshcentral there is one Mac

Yes, last thursday i tried to come to the comm meeting, but it changed at a short notice.
The recording isn't uploaded yet?

[NewUserfromDE]

AMT:
vPro ist just a part of AMT, vPro is a marketing term like Centrino. So every AMT enabled system is a vPro system but not every vPro system has AMT. Personally I find it really difficult to find / buy an actual AMT system., often it's just a system with a vPro processor but without AMT. If Ylian would still work for Intel I would hint this to him ;-) Because of Windows 11 I need to buy half a dozen PCs and would like to have AMT, but all I find are expensive workstations. Also AMT may have as far as I understand security problems, since it's undocumented and already had bugs and is always online / reachable, so I have closed this idea topic for me personally and was very happy to learn that MeshCenral works in general with many systems besides special controllers AND is open source, so this is IMHO the very best remote management system in existence (RustDesk is somewhat unclear regarding ownership and costs, so I dropped this, too).

Monthly Meeting:
Hm, AFAIK there was no change ;-) I attended and it was date and time as planned. The next one is on Februrary 27th (last Thursday in February) at 15:00 German time. Do you plan to attend? There was also a German user at the meeting in November. If this wasn't you, then we would be already 3 ;-) He just has to find this discussion and/or attend the meeting again.

Recordings:
Indeed, Sammy hasn't upload the January recording yet. Maybe busy. Also he missed to record some part due to technical problems. Let's wait a week :D

[simpsonetti]

AMT: vPro ist just a part of AMT, vPro is a marketing term like Centrino. So every AMT enabled system is a vPro system but not every vPro system has AMT. Personally I find it really difficult to find / buy an actual AMT system., often it's just a system with a vPro processor but without AMT. If Ylian would still work for Intel I would hint this to him ;-) Because of Windows 11 I need to buy half a dozen PCs and would like to have AMT, but all I find are expensive workstations. Also AMT may have as far as I understand security problems, since it's undocumented and already had bugs and is always online / reachable, so I have closed this idea topic for me personally and was very happy to learn that MeshCenral works in general with many systems besides special controllers AND is open source, so this is IMHO the very best remote management system in existence (RustDesk is somewhat unclear regarding ownership and costs, so I dropped this, too).

Well, for sure i know thats AMT onBoard. i get 2 DELL Laptops with AMT from a try&buy programm.
And yes, the documentation is aweful for amt. There are some things in the videso from Ylian that i'm trying to rebuild here but some won'T work...
And yes, for us it's quite the best RMS . I've tested some, open source, commercial and this is quite far the best. And i hope with higher versions are some features added that i don'T know i need them :D

Monthly Meeting: Hm, AFAIK there was no change ;-) I attended and it was date and time as planned. The next one is on Februrary 27th (last Thursday in February) at 15:00 German time. Do you plan to attend? There was also a German user at the meeting in November. If this wasn't you, then we would be already 3 ;-) He just has to find this discussion and/or attend the meeting again.

I didn't was there. I plan to attend...

Recordings: Indeed, Sammy hasn't upload the January recording yet. Maybe busy. Also he missed to record some part due to technical problems. Let's wait a week :D

yeah, it's fine.

[NewUserfromDE]

Yilian didn't make it to the last meeting, I think he will be at the next. But for sure Simon will be there as far as I understood. So be prepared to ask your AMT questions :-D Also really do prepare, so people don't get bored, I guess most of them don't have AMT ;-)

[fyppes]

Hello there,

Austria here, Vienna based, against splitting the discussions, however, some aspects may fit better localized discussion groups/elsewhere.

a) admin
b) commercial
c) In principle interested in investing, albeit not for code signing certificates

Started using MC about two years ago, initially toyed around with it, then it became more and more a replacement for anydesk.

At present only using it on Windows machines, plan on using it with Linux relatively soon, Mac not so soon.

Very happy with the software, obviously there's always room for improvement.

I'm more of a RTFM kind of guy, what I would have wanted in the beginning is written documentation that is moderately current, I set up my MC server, then I started to discover additional features, which, admittedly, were covered to a large extent in the videos by Ylian.

I`m pretty sure that the adoption of MC would be better if the documentation were at a more current level and if there were more how-to documents.

If I were to start again, I'd have used different domains for my MC. I guess that eventually I'll set up a new MC server and migrate the current machines over there.

I like the plugin capability and if I had time, I'm fairly certain that I would play around with coding a bit in that area.

Cheers,
Philipp

[NewUserfromDE]

Hi @fyppes / Philipp, nice to meet you. Thanks for all the information, so we are 3 now ;-)

Investing:

• Code signing certificates are just a personal motivation and point of me, since I don't see the economic sense to buy it for just a few machines. I can, but I don't want to. Even if it are more machines, because, I'm an advocate of open source and its communities and bundling forces. But this would need a legal organization that buys and owns the certificates (for its members, because of scammer and because of motivation to invest).
• I guess my second (unwritten) idea is more for your liking: Voting on ideas and bundling forces / investments to make them happen.
• From a legal point of view I'd also like to have an organization, so that spending to them is an operating cost in sense of taxes ("Betriebsausgabe" in German). I'm not sure if the current donation system would allow this in sense of tax rules. For Germany this would be a "Verein" for example. Austria would need its own organization or join the German one, its seems every member of an EU state can join. The form of an European "Verein" does not yet exist and given the state of the EU and the world I don't think the law process will be finished in the next years. But I'm no EU law expert ;-)

Written documentation:

• +1 from me, I had and have the same problem. On the other hand the videos help all those that are used more to videos and it's a difference to other applications, that are limited to a written documentation (which often does not help regarding commercial software). For both groups of users its helpful to be able to see how and where Yilian did something, this is an advantage. Of course, the videos do need notably more time to "read" and can't be searched. The possibilities nowadays with auto captioning and adjustable speed to alleviate this a bit. So yes, there should exist a written documentation parallel.
• I don't think the coders will write a documentation or that any of us wants them to spend time with this instead of coding. So especially in open source projects this would be a task for the community with support from the coders for understanding.
• In my mind this would mean:
  1. increase the active community by enlarging the meetings
  2. propose / vote on the idea of a written documentation
  3. do the lengthy work of writing the documentation by combined forces (form a team, wiki, chapters, paragraphs)
  4. success :D

(A discouraging discussion would appear later, namely how to keep both, video an written documentation up to date or if only one gets updated and how. But that's life.)

[fyppes]

If we're talking about a code signing certificate for MC in general, yes, why not. We still need a way for people to sign the agent themselves with a code signing certificate (if they want to "whitelabel" or customize the agent).

Association or Verein, fine with me.

My main gripe with videos is that there is no quick way to search for a specific term like you can do with written documentation. Different people have different approaches towards soaking up knowledge, not saying that we should favour one kind of documentation over the other, they won't be at the same level ever, also understood and agreed.

Nobody likes to write documentation, at least I haven't met anyone who does :-)

I'm willing to help in that effort, but, as you rightly express it - we should go about that aspect of MC in an agreed and structured way.

[NewUserfromDE]

Code Signing Certificate

First (months ago) I wanted a code signing certificate in general yes, but hen I changed my mind, because it would make it easier for scammers (the reason Yilian does not / could not provide it anymore) and therefore make it harder for "commercial" users (more false positives at AV scanners and Microsoft Smart Screen)

And because it's a chance, not a problem: It's always hard to find working open source business models. The certificate is something normal users can get over, but which "commercial" users (with customers) would usually need. And then when spending on such a thing, why not share costs and spend (e.g. the saved money) on MeshCentral in general (funding)?

So no, personally my aim is not a certificate for all (won't work) but as a service for donating / paying business users. And this would lead to associations per country (or country region). Perfect to get a stable MeshCentral funding. Of course any user can buy a code signign certificate and customzie the agent, but it expensive, see #6705.

Documentation

Searchable, agreed! (I mostly use the commented configs as a workaround.)

Yes, I also would be willing to write documentation, but I know how much work this is. So maybe some paragraphs or one chapter for me. But possible as a larger team, a structured community can do this.

[NewUserfromDE]

@fyppes To my shame I must admit that there is of course a written documentation, which I also already used and then forgot about: https://ylianst.github.io/MeshCentral/meshcentral/

Do you know this already?

[simpsonetti]

code signing is realy interesting.
And forming a german "gemeinnütziger Verein" could help to spend money.
We can't spend money to a github repo; we have to earmarked. And therefor a "Verein" should be the best possibilities.

[NewUserfromDE]

Thanks. Two opinions:

1. Spending via GitHub donations won't work for a larger community. Also a local association can do much more than spending / donating, it's a way to organize a large community, especially since MeshCentral is international. For example I did booths on open source fairs and organize local meetings.

2. Personally I would do a "Verein" but not a "gemeinnützig" (nonprofit) one. Not because of earning money, but because of Herman tax laws. I already did a "gemeinnützig" one. Its "dangerous" because you have to pay later the taxes of years (and ruin the Verein) if politics suddenly say you aren't nonprofit. And this happens in Germany. The judgements aren't logical and its a way to stop nonprofit associations (by commercial competitors or for political reasons) and this did happen more than once (not to me, but see press). At the moment the government is not in favor of open source (Scholz, Microsoft and cutting ZenDIS funding) and the new one won't be, too. In addition USA government will extend their commercial software and clouds. Open source will have some harder times compared to the last years. So I would not risk the danger of nonprofit, its not clever. Nonprofit is only important to private donors because of taxes, but I aim at business users. I would indeed even do a eG, but most people aren't familiar with this, but they all know "Verein" ;-D

[tobias9931]

Hello, or „Servus“ from southern Germany.
I am an admin and we use MeshCentral for our internal company clients.
For internal IT support and to maintain production PCs.
That's around 3.000 computers and laptops worldwide.

I have already asked Simon Smith to issue an invoice and send it to us, which we have paid for as support.
According to him, we were the first ones he wrote an invoice for.

[simpsonetti]

Hello, or „Servus“ from southern Germany. I am an admin and we use MeshCentral for our internal company clients. For internal IT support and to maintain production PCs. That's around 3.000 computers and laptops worldwide.

I have already asked Simon Smith to issue an invoice and send it to us, which we have paid for as support. According to him, we were the first ones he wrote an invoice for.

Well, thats realy intressting, how? I was aslking for our budgetplan this year and in my special area i have nothing.
Maybe per PM?

[NewUserfromDE]

Servus tobias9931 =)

Now we are 4: 3 from Germany, 1 from Austria.

Thanks for the infos. That are a lot of machines! I never managed more than 500 - 1000, but that is past and without MeshCentral. Do you use MeshCentral on (almost) all of them? Or do you use a mix of tools, like e.g. VNC?

[NewUserfromDE]

Well, thats realy intressting, how? I was aslking for our budgetplan this year and in my special area i have nothing.
Maybe per PM?

@si458 Simon, please see comment, maybe this is important to you.