Gears can now help monitor and manage all types of devices! Last month we released Gears agents for Linux, Androidand iOS. With our latest release we are introducing an open source version of the Linux agent. This new open source Gears agent is designed to compile on most Linux distributions and can certainly be extended to other operating systems as well.
Code Name: Alabama
- Gears Open Source Agent
- Rebranding Enhancements
- OPSWAT Gears: The Next Generation
- New Gears Product Support Page
- Other Fixes and Enhancements
Gears Open Source Agent
The open source agent will compile on Linux systems, so it will work for IoT, servers and even Raspberry Pis. Without any changes it will handle client registration and reporting, updating, retiring, and local configurations. It also has prebuilt functions for Linux specific detection of details like the current logged in user, password status, hostname, and network adapter info. It can be extended to detect and report installed packages, running processes, disk encryption and even scan files and IPs with Metascan® or Metascan Online's multi-scanning technology.
We think the open source OPSWAT Gears client would be useful for:
Raspberry Pis: An affordable credit-card sized computer that can be connected to any monitor or TV, and can be programmed to monitor and control home servers, clouds, and media centers. Using the Gears open source agent can help secure your newly customized home network, treating each connected Raspberry Pi device as its own endpoint.
Smart TVs running Tizen as their operating system. The Tizen SDK is a great open source operating system, and with Gears, home users can integrate the agent to send their Smart TV details to their Gears Cloud account.
OPEN WRT, a Linux distribution for embedded devices (IoT), provides developers with a fully writeable file system. This distribution allows users to remove application and configuration restrictions from the vendor, freeing the embedded device for better custom integrations. Using OPSWAT Gear's open source agent with your OPEN WRT devices will provide the needed visibility and security to protect your network from malware threats.
The open source agent is written in C++ with a GPL license in order to make integration and configurations both simple and malleable. In the spirit of openness, our friends at PacketFence will be showcasing their open source NAC solution with us at Educause. Their solution is integrated with Gears through our open REST API, and would be a great way to enforce access control for Gears agents using the new open source client! Watch the video for an overview of the integration:
The code and documentation are available on GitHub, clone or fork it and let us know what you think!
Rebranding Enhancements
The Gears UI is already highly customizable, and we are now allowing Gears admins to hide all social sharing buttons and to set their own font sizes. To adjust font sizes, admins can upload their organization's rebranding packages within the configuration tab:
OPSWAT Gears: The Next Generation
Next year we will be traveling to a new frontier with OPSWAT Gears, and we wanted to give you a sneak peek. The Next Generation will be able to be installed on an on-premises server, just like OPSWAT's Metascan®. Having the technology on premises makes integration and maintenance easy to setup with your internal network, and allows for endpoint visibility from within an air gapped network. The Next Generation Gears agent will beam all device data to the on-premises server, just as it would to the Gears Cloud.
The Next Generation will also feature a completely redesigned architecture that will allow administrators to use all of the Gears features more efficiently.
New Gears Product Support Page:
Gears supports robust compliance policies for thousands of applications. To find out what Gears policies are supported in each of those applications, check out our new product support comparison chart.
Other Fixes and Enhancements
- Disable scripting error popup in Gears App UI
- Enhancements to Mac client side integration
- Font faces are also available for customization. Please let me know if you would like to do so.
