In my previous article I wrote about my search for a remote control program replacement and my requirements. Here I want to expand on the one I chose, Mesh Central, and what I have learned after almost 18 months of using it.

First, let’s get to the nitty gritty, don’t use them! Now on to why.

When I first started using Mesh it, the only email address was on the tutorial page. He responded, then for the first few months, and then there has NEVER been a reply from it.ylian.saint-hilaire@intel.com was and is the only email on the site. When contacting my Intel representatives they claim no knowledge of the project.

Their web site and deployment system is basic and creating the groups was easy enough. Creating an account was easy enough with a simple home page.

Once the account has been created you to to “My Account” and create ‘Administrative Meshes’ which in my case were the different customers I serve.

You select “new” from the middle of the above screen and create a Mesh name (group name) and password as well as some of the things you would like to be able to do when accessing the remote machine.

Under “Tutorials” on the menu bar you have a real basic one, but it was enough I could do what was needed.

Once I created and then deployed their software on a customer’s computer I noticed that connections were not as fast as with LMI and I had a few times when the connection was dropped for no known reason.

Then I began to notice on my bigger networks a lot of odd traffic. After spending hours of personal time it turned out that Mesh was checking in with servers in California and Europe making short but still seconds long connections, disconnecting and then repeating hundreds of times a day. If I blocked these two IP addresses I could not access the remote computers.

The next adventure started when something created duplicate computers.

For some reason, one would just be disconnected and not ever show connected again and a new computer with the same name or the actual computer name in windows would appear. Above the computer name is the same as assigned in Mesh, sometimes the computer name was not the same, say “Desk 9” was the computer name while I had set it up in Mesh as “Cindy”. Confusion abounded. And of course, my emails about this were never replied to.

After a couple of months the disconnects became multiple times every few minutes, then I could not connect at all or the remote would show “connected” yet all I received was a black screen similar to the one above.

If I logged out of the Mesh Web site, opened a different browser I MIGHT be able to log on, if that did not work I could try a different computer and that normally worked, until the connection dropped again.

This happened on all my clients networks so naturally I thought it must be my office network. I never had a drop with LMI. However that turnout out to be incorrect, I had the same issue when connecting from one clients network to another and when connecting on different computers at different locations at different times of the day and week.

Dropping an needing to reconnect, if possible just has become unbearable and helping my clients was frustrating. So I began to look for another replacement to LMI and Mesh about three months ago. I gave the previous losers a fair chance and once again they were losers, undeserving of my money. That is when I found SplashTop. More on them next time.

Until we meet again, have a virus free week!