Meshcentral: Manage Clipboard in remote viewing

[merlinweb]

Great Great Software, awesome, thanks a lot for your work.
I'm introducing meshcentral in my company, instead of ammyy or teamviewer, works great.
Only thing I miss is clipboard between remote and local machines (agent based), very useful for my purposes (copying scripts or configurations and pasting directly on remote screen side)
Is there a way to achieve this function? Or simply I don't know how to get it ?

[whalehub]

@merlinweb This feature will be implemented soon. See #41 for reference.

[krayon007]

Actually I just finished this feature, for both Windows and Linux. I pushed all the changes to GIT for the agent, and I gave Ylian the code to integrate into the webapp. So it should be released very soon... MacOS support will come later, as I'm heading out on vacation...

[merlinweb]

thanks both, sorry for duplicating, but searching for "clipboard" don't let me find #41
Amazing...

[Ylianst]

Just published @MeshCentral v0.3.0-m with clipboard transfer support for Windows and Linux. Large and very difficult work done by Bryan to get this working on so many platforms. Linux is especially difficult. No MacOS support yet. Testing and feedback appreciated.

[PathfinderNetworks]

Hi Ylian, I just updated our Mesh Central server (which is running on Server 2019) to 0.3.0-n. I can see the Clipboard button when viewing the desktop of devices. Clicking the button brings up the Remote Clipboard dialog box- but you can't get or send any data through it. Clicking on 'Get Clipboard' doesn't pull in the remote device clipboard data. Nor does clicking Set Clipboard send any data to the remote device. I tried both using Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge browsers.

[krayon007]

What OS is the target machine that you are remoted into?

[PathfinderNetworks]

Server 2019. I'll try some Win10 machines and see how it acts. Just tried a Win10 box (release 1809) and a Server 2016 box and it's doing the same as I had mentioned.

[krayon007]

Is there more than one user logged into the Server 2019 target? I wonder if it's using the wrong user's context.

[PathfinderNetworks]

No, only one user (which is the administrator). Same for the other devices I just tried.

[krayon007]

Interesting.. I have a bunch of Windows 10 release 17134, and it works great... I'll build a test system with the latest updates...I do know Server 2019 has some issues I need to fix, because MS changed the behavior of some things, regarding the terminal...

[PathfinderNetworks]

I'll see if I can add an older device (such as Windows 7) to my MeshCentral2 server. I still have most all of my devices under MeshCentral1 and have only moved over a small handful of newer devices to test.

[krayon007]

I just tested it on Windows Server 2016 release 14393, and clipboard works in both direction... What build is your server 2016?

[PathfinderNetworks]

I just added a Server 2008 R2 device to my MeshCentral2 setup- it's not working there either. So I wonder if it's something to do on the MeshCentral server side of things? I just updated tonight to 0.3.0-n. As mentioned, it is running on Server 2019.

[PathfinderNetworks]

The Server 2016 box is release 17763.348

[Ylianst]

If you are administrator on your server, click on a device, go to the "console" tab and use the "getclip" and "setclip" commands you get and set the remote clipboard. If that works, then it's certainly a server side problem.

[PathfinderNetworks]

I just tried that- that also does not work. The commands show up in the console but no clipboard data is transferred from (via getclip) or to (via setclip) the device.

[krayon007]

What language/region is your windows machine set to? Really strange you are having issues with Windows, the windows clipboard API is straightforward, it's the Linux clipboard api that is complex.

Another test you can do is to run the agent in console mode. When you run it in console mode, the agent doesn't need to spawn a child process into the user's context to access the clipboard.

[krayon007]

Actually. To use the setclip command, you need to specify the data too. Unless you are saying the text you typed was lost? From the image your posted it looks like it didn't even try to access the clipboard because it didn't receive any text to write.

Did you type something like:
setclip testdata

[PathfinderNetworks]

It's set to English/US. I'm trying this from a Windows 10 machine (version 1809). In both Edge and Chrome. Here are a coupe more screen grabs. The first is the command I'm entering. The second is the result of that command. The data 'this is a test' is never sent to the remote clipboard.

[Ylianst]

You have to use setclip with one argument like this:

setclip hello
setclip "hello this is bob"

Without the quotes the setclip command will think it's multiple arguments and will fail, I will try to make the help message more clear. Can you try it again?

[PathfinderNetworks]

Using quotes did result in a different response- which looks like it sent the clipboard data. But, when viewing the desktop of the device, that clipboard data (in this case the text 'this is a test') is still not actually sent to the remote device.

[Ylianst]

If you do getclip after the setclip, what does it show?

[PathfinderNetworks]

The getclip command shows the data that was set with setclip. Which means you'd think that is the data that is present on the remote device. But it's not. When I view the desktop of that same device and try to paste data from the clipboard there is nothing there (or, if there is data there, it's data that was copied to the clipboard previously in that same Windows session by using the 'copy' command or Ctrl-C).

[Ylianst]

Ok, this is likely because the MeshAgent is setting the clipboard in the wrong user context. One thing you can try is to stop the MeshAgent windows service. Launch MeshAgent.exe again and hit the "connect" button. This will launch a temporary MeshAgent in the current user context. Then try set/getclip again. It will probably work. Let us know if you try it and what you see.

[PathfinderNetworks]

Ok, doing that does allow the setting and getting of the clipboard. Still strange, however, as the same user that the MeshAgent was installed under is the user I'm logging in to the device as. And is the same user I'm running the MeshAgent as 'Running as temporary agent' for this test.

[Ylianst]

Good. When installing as a background service, the agent run in a completely different context unrelated to the users that installed it. The agent has to try to figure out in what user context to set to clipboard. It's also possible no user is logged in at all. Bryan will have to investigate when he gets back from vacation. But this is likely an agent side issue.

You can test the server by doing a set clipboard using the server UI and using "getclip in the agent console to see if the agent got it. Also the opposite, use setclip and fetch the clipboard using the server UI.

[Ylianst]

Bryan pointed out the getclip and setclip commands in the agent did not work the same way as the code used by the server. Just published MeshCentral v0.3.0-o that fixes that. If you can retry the getclip and setclip on that version, would be great.

[PathfinderNetworks]

Thanks Ylian, I just updated my server to 0.3.0-n. That fixed the clipboard issues. It's now working correctly both through the console and via the Clipboard button. Perfect!

[Ylianst]

Perfect. Thanks.