MeshCentral, Grav and BentoPDF add-ons

Hi everyone! I am here to share 3 add-ons that I wrote because they weren’t available elsewhere. Here is a brief explanation of why I needed them (and you might too). You can view the repo here.

  1. I was looking for a remote desktop access server, and tried using the Apache Guacamole add-on from Alex Belgium’s repo. However, it was too large in size, had excess functionality, and required the RDP/VNC servers to be accessible to the internet (downside of clientless remote access). So, I got to know about MeshCentral. It works very well with Windows RDP, and even has web sockets support. For VNC, it was kind of difficult to setup for a headless setup, but works well thereafter. On Archlinux, the key was to use x11vnc, rather than TigerVNC. The total image size ~600MB, which is much smaller than Apache Guacamole.
  2. Grav is basically a light-weight content management system (CMS). I wanted an alternate to bookstack for writing stuff that doesn’t belong to a lengthy topic. It also supports multi-site setup (you can have 2 sub-domains pointing to the same service, and get different websites). Image size ~ 160MB, RAM use ~100MB.
  3. BentoPDF - This is a great website that provides a LOT of PDF tools, which run on the browser, rather than the server. It is under very active development. All the tools are also available on their official website, but the self-hosted version is able to strip off the branding (a bit more user friendly). Image size ~430MB, CPU & RAM usage very low.
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Meshcentral is amazing, thank you for your efforts! I will have to check out the others too.

Please explain in what sense MeshCentral is an add-on in Hass?

Is it to see remote desktops inside Hass? Or the other way around, to show the Hass desktop remotely?

Not OP, but for me, I can host mesh central on HAOS without requiring another host (virtual or bare metal). It does not really have anything with HA itself, MC is a remote management application, where you can get remote access to desktops, commandlines, file systems. It is similar to teamviewer, but local.

I access it locally via the url you configure (mesh.yourwhateverdomain.local/com). You download and install an agent on the local machines you want to control.