Background Tools EA available for all customers!

[NeerajK]

Today, we are excited to announce that the Early Access for Background Tools is available to all organizations. Background Tools enhances your ability to troubleshoot issues, manage files, and streamline your IT operations without interrupting your end users.

Key Capabilities:

Remote Command Line Access: Seamlessly access the command line interface of remote systems from the comfort of your browser. Supports interactive command responses, tab completion, special keys, text editors and much more. 

Remote File Manager: Take control of your file management tasks across your fleet. Upload, download, move, copy, and delete files on remote systems with ease.

Note that you must opt-in to Background Access from the Settings > Features page. By default it is disabled. This is available for Windows and macOS at this time and Linux support is on the roadmap.

Getting Started: Get Started: Background Tools and Remote File Manager

As always, thank you for being a valued member of our community and for your commitment to helping us shape the future of our solutions.

[rlyons]

This is really awesome, ESPECIALLY for us Mac admins. I know it's still Beta and all, but any word on Linux support, especially the terminal access?

[NeerajK]

@rlyons could you please advise what Linux distros you are looking to support. We are looking at adding Linux support, but it will roll out based on distros. 

[rlyons]

I use mostly Debian and Ubuntu. Obviously, it would make sense to have RedHat/Fedora in there. Those are your big ones for most prod deployments. For desktops, PopOS is pretty.. ahem.. POPular. And while I don't know how often it is used in the enterprise, SMBs have made a fair bit of use of Alpine Linux for container and embedded OSes.

That last one, you'll probably have to put some research into. I don't have numbers.

The biggest Linux issue I have is that the JC agent install script/agent verification for new Linux releases seems to be INCREDIBLY slow. Debian 12 was released back on June 10th, and we still don't have a date for Agent Compatibility. That's nearing half a year for a major release. I'm not gonna jump ship over this or anything, and overall JC's multi platform support is great. Just something that needs a little more attention, even though, I'm sure it's somewhere on the list after MacOS Sonoma, new Zero Touch for Windows, etc.... 😉

Edit: (Seriously though... I miss having a single SSH login for all my Proxmox 8 cluster nodes....)

[NeerajK]

Thanks for the inputs on the distros @rlyons! Happy to share that it aligns with our current distro-based rollout plans. I have also conveyed your feedback about the need for faster qualification of JC Agent on new versions to the right folks.