hi guys and welcome back to another apricor video thanks for coming back and checking out
the channel today absolute pleasure to have you back and today we're going to be looking
at em remote ng as it describes itself it's a multi-remote next generation connection manager i
use it personally every day in my job working in a windows environment but it's also useful for linux
and other operating systems as well and it's going to help you consolidate all of those connections
into one place to help you manage all your servers and resources efficiently and securely if you like
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welcome to join us in discord where we can discuss the topic of today's video and anything else
that has been coming up recently so without further ado let's just get stuck into it
so guys today we're going to be looking at something that we don't actually have to install
on our server but lets us access our server and other servers in one helpful place i discovered
m remote ng only a few months ago and that was from a colleague i had seen that he'd use it for
all of his idp connections and in my line of work we have to access many different virtual machines
and hosts from inside and outside of our local networks across the state so this tool is actually
very helpful for those who a are either on the road and have many different ways they need to
connect to things b they possibly just have a lot of systems at home a lot of operating systems vms
ssh all of that stuff and are at a point where they want to help organize in one easy to use
place that's where m remote ng is going to come in so m remote ng is a fork of m remote which
is an open source tabbed multi-protocol remote connections manager for windows
m remote ng adds bug fixes and new features to m remote and allows you to view all of your
remote connections in a simple yet powerful tabbed interface so that's in their own words we're going
to show you exactly what it looks like once we get in but for those who are wondering you know is it
for me here's the supported protocol so you can do rdp vnc ssh telnet http and ttps are login raw
socket connections and powershell remoting as well so it's extremely useful to system administrators
but also to anyone else who like us our home labs running maybe various virtual machines
docker containers whatever the case might be and you want to access your hosts or the virtual
machines themselves so this basic screenshot gives you a rough idea what it looks like but i'm going
to show you in the actual app because there's a lot more to it it's also worth noting as well
that they have of course their own official documentation which is pretty extensive so i
really recommend you guys check that out if you decide to pick up m remote ng and give it a play
they didn't approach us for this video this is just a tool that i thought was really helpful
so it took me a long time to find it i'm hoping it helps someone else out who might be interested
okay so what we're going to do now is actually download the app so let's go to download
the website by the way is mremoteng.org and we're going to go for the stable release here
we are on the installer let's go through the wizard we'll accept click next it's going to
ask you what features you want to install in the uh installation so we're going to go with
complete which is already by default if for some reason you didn't want pad eng if you didn't want
a desktop shortcut etc change that there click next and click install now i think i mentioned
it earlier but this is targeted at windows users and so i don't know about you guys i know that
there's plenty of us that still use windows as our main desktop but want an easy way to access
all of our apps now i have shown you termias in the past even just as late as the last video
for ssh connections and that does a fantastic job especially if you're using a lot of linux
environments but using something like mremo ng if you're more windows heavy but also use
linux environments why not even if you just solely linux i think it still does it justice and handles
everything that you need perfectly fine okay so it started up for the first time and it's going
to ask for automatic update settings we're going to say go ahead and use the recommended settings
or you can customize them as you like now heads up you're about to get flashbanged and here we are so
when you first start it up it is a very bright white the good news is that we can change that
so go to options go to the theme and enable themes now you're going to get a whole bunch
of stuff one extra thing to note is that you can actually customize each theme the way you want it
so these are just sort of templates if you will we can go with visual studio 2013 for example maybe
even 2015 whatever the case might be all right so now that we're in and we have a nice dark mode
going let's figure out what we can do with this now what i'm going to do first is actually import
a configuration from my live work environment which is another benefit of the app so you can
export and import configuration from anywhere that you already have it and you can also
reconnect to all the open connections as well so let's click on import and import from file
alternatively we can actually import directly from active directory or from via a port scan now
that's really handy like i said if you have a very heavy windows environment pulling straight from
active directory is amazing so let's go with the file now i've picked my xml and if we just export
this you can see here our export is there so these are all of our connections that we pulled through
so these are some of my work servers for example that we manage so easy enough we can see exactly
what they are now if you scroll down to the bottom here i'm going to show you an established one
so it brew in for example here's what it looks like in its configuration let's expand that out
expand it out a little bit more maybe you can see so we can put our name our description
and we can change the icon so let's change the icon for example if we just click here
it gives you the icons so you can select what kind of machine it is if it's an esx host is
it a virtual machine is it another m remote ng we can do that as well so select the icon that suits
then we can add our hostname username password domain the protocol is of course the important
part if you're accessing a windows virtual machine obviously rdp is probably going to be the option
you're going to select alternatively then you can pick all your other options so we can go with ssh
for example so just for us to demonstrate what i'm going to do is create a new connection and
we're going to do an ssh one first so let's do that so let's go with name and we'll call this
romulus description is media server for the icon i'm just going to pick web server that suits me
and we'll put in the ip address and we've selected ssh version 2. we can see the connection is there
let's double click that and it's going to ask us to trust it we click yes and there we go we have
ssh now running now let's say we want to open up another connection simultaneously pretty easy all
we have to do then is select the connection in this case i've got our windows machine in
the cloud let's double click that and here you can see we're now connected to windows as well
the other thing is sometimes people enjoy the popping out function of rdp so what we can do is
right click and select full screen that will then actually switch it out and connect it through rdp
now the other tools we have we go to tools we've got external tools port scan components check and
ssh file transfer as well so let's go with port scan for example and we'll run a port scan on our
local subnet here at home and here we go we've started finding some exposed ports here port 22
on these hosts scroll down a little bit further a little bit further up and we've got port 80 443
and 22 and 80. so obviously 22 is ssh ports which is not unexpected but it gives you an easy way to
diagnose your network and see where your ports and your holes are in your firewall so guys i think
you get the gist of it so the last thing we're going to do real quick is run through its options
menu just to give you an idea on what it's capable of so we've got startup and exit so we can change
a couple of the options there do you want it to reconnect to previously open sessions so you can
just go straight back into wherever you left off allow only a single instance of the application
and check the proper installation of components at startup you've then got appearance options as well
this will help improve your experience depending on what you want to achieve as well
we've got our notifications here as well and where the log file is being saved then you have
options for connections now with rdp how many times do you want it to connect or reconnect
and for default credentials to use you can set these ones now with the credentials if we
want to set a default it basically means let's say you know for a factor all of your virtual
machine the same login and password makes sense to just put this option in save you having to
enter that on each connection setting now we can actually also connect to an sql server and have
sql store our data for us that's a little bit more advanced so we won't need to do that today
updates what kind of updates you want to pull through you remember at the start we just said set
it up for us this is the options that it selected we have the option to change that if you want to
as well how often you want it to check etc etc now we have the theme like i said earlier so we can
actually modify the theme if we want and so again i've just switched it up and gone with the dracula
one for example and alternatively like i said you can actually just click new create a theme for
yourself so it will copy the current one that you have and then it will allow you to customize it
any way you want so you can then change the colors of pretty much anything really you have all these
options and then you can make it the theme that works for you for security you can also encrypt
any connection files that you create and then you have advanced as well so you can do a couple
of things for party to configure party sessions and things like that so obviously if you didn't
know it's using putty for this ssh connection and putty is plenty stable it's been around for a long
time so if you're frequently using ssh then you've probably already known about putty anyway if you
want to go further in a connection we can right click select putty settings and then it will take
you into the putty settings that you're probably more familiar with as well so guys that pretty
much covers m remote ng it's a nice quick one for you today i hope it's a tool that you might find
useful i definitely do and i know many of you who are using windows environments will find it useful
as well especially once you start getting into the numbers of having to maintain multiple systems
it's a very very useful tool free and open source what more could we ask for thanks guys
i hope you enjoyed today's video and we can't wait to see you in the next hebrew hall video
you