Remote screen control

The Remote Screen Control page at /settings/remote-screen is where a deployment operator decides whether remote control sessions are recorded, how long those recordings live on disk, and — when something needs reviewing — where those recordings are watched, downloaded, or deleted. It is an audit-and-compliance page, not a connection page.

Session transport itself — H.264 versus JPEG, relay versus SignalR, agent authentication — is covered in Chapter 3.5. Nothing on this admin page changes how sessions connect; it only controls what the server does with a recording once a session has ended.

A.7.1 Recording behaviour

Two controls drive the recording behaviour for the whole deployment.

• Force session recording — a single toggle at the top of the page. When on, the Remote Server records every remote control session that any operator starts against any device. Recording cannot be declined by the operator and is not surfaced as a per-session option; the policy is deployment-wide. When off, no server-side recording is performed. The field description on the page reads "When enabled, all remote screen control sessions will be recorded by the server."
• Save — the toolbar action that persists the toggle. Changes do not apply to sessions already in progress; a recording started under the old setting continues to behave as it did when it began.

Note: The recording is produced by the Remote Server, not by the operator's browser. You do not need any client-side capture software, and the session being recorded does not reveal itself to the remote user any differently from an unrecorded session. Treat the toggle as a compliance decision: once it is on, every session is evidence, and every operator should be told so.

A.7.2 Retention and auto-purge

Recording indefinitely is rarely what compliance wants. Two fields manage lifetime:

• Auto purge — a checkbox that enables automatic cleanup on a rolling window. When off, recordings are kept until an operator deletes them from the session browser.
• Older than X days — the retention window, in days. Recordings older than the chosen value are removed on the next purge cycle. Valid range on self-hosted deployments is 1 to 9999 days.

Cloud only: On cloud deployments, the retention window is fixed at seven days and the numeric field is hidden. The page shows the text "Your recordings will be kept for seven days." instead. To keep recordings longer on cloud, download the ZIP before the seven-day window elapses (see A.7.3).

Self-hosted operators have the whole range at their disposal, but two ends deserve a thought. Setting Auto purge with a value of 1 day is effectively "keep recordings only long enough to review them the same day they happen". A value of 9999 is effectively "forever" — at that point, budget disk space the same way you would for any long-lived evidence store, and review capacity periodically. The auto-purge loop walks the recording directories on the Remote Server and deletes any session folder whose age exceeds the threshold; nothing outside those directories is touched.

A.7.3 The recorded-session browser

The lower half of the page is a table of recorded sessions. It is not populated on page load — rebuilding the list on every render would scan every recording directory on every page visit, and those directories can be large. Instead the toolbar carries a Load Sessions action that triggers a one-time scan and fills the table.

Each row represents one recorded session, with three row actions:

• View — opens the Recording Session Viewer, an in-Console playback dialog. Use this for quick review without copying the recording off the server.
• Download ZIP — packages the session's files into a zip archive and triggers a browser download. Use this when evidence has to leave the server — for an external auditor, a ticket attachment, or a long-term archive outside the retention window.
• Delete — opens a confirmation dialog and, on confirm, deletes the session directory. Deletion is immediate and not undoable. The auto-purge setting does not replace the button; operators still need manual delete for sessions they want gone sooner than the window allows.

If a session row is missing from the table after Load Sessions, check whether the session actually fell into the current retention window — auto-purge may already have removed it.

A.7.4 Interactions with other settings

• Connection transport. Chapter 3.5 documents the H.264 / JPEG and relay / SignalR choices. Neither affects whether a session is recorded; the Force session recording toggle applies to sessions reached over any transport.
• Maintenance mode. Maintenance mode suppresses notifications but does not suspend recording. A session started during maintenance is still recorded if the toggle is on. See A.2 for maintenance-mode semantics.
• Per-operator opt-out. None exists. Session recording is enforced at the server, not at the operator's workstation, so no client-side setting can bypass it.

Permissions

• settings_enabled — access to the Settings group at all.
• settings_remote_screen_enabled — access to this page's toggles and session browser.

Related chapters

• Chapter 3.5 — Remote control — how remote control sessions are established and what transports are available.
• A.2 — Updates & maintenance — maintenance windows and notification suppression.
• A.9 — Logging & protocols — for server-side logs that record the start and stop of each remote control session.
• A.12 — Content defaults — related Settings sub-pages in Part IV.