Architecture
How Roomler is put together — one control plane, three data planes, one agent per machine, and a server that coordinates without ever carrying your traffic.
Roomler’s shape follows from two invariants. Almost every design question in the product is answered by one of them.
Control plane, data planes
There is one control plane — accounts, permissions, the device registry, signalling — and three data planes that it introduces but does not carry:
| Data plane | Carries | Path |
|---|---|---|
| Remote desktop | Video, input, clipboard, files | Peer-to-peer, relay fallback |
| Private network | Whatever you send over the mesh | Peer-to-peer, relay fallback |
| Conferencing | Call audio and video | Through the server’s forwarding unit |
Conferencing is the deliberate exception
A selective forwarding unit has to receive and re-send media; that is what makes a multi-party call practical. The other two planes never work this way. It is worth knowing which feature is which — see what the server sees.
Read on
System overview
— The pieces, and how a request moves through them.
The agent
— What runs on a machine, and why it is one process.
Connection cascade
— How two machines find the best path that works.
What the server sees
— Precisely what is and is not visible to the control plane.
Why “one daemon” keeps coming up
Because it explains answers that otherwise look unhelpful. “Can I run a second copy for my other organization?” — no, and not out of licensing: the agent owns a network adapter with a fixed name, a single local control socket, host-global routing and firewall state, and one updater. Two copies fight over all of them.
The supported answer is one agent with several enrollments — see multi-org.
In this section
System overview
The pieces of a Roomler deployment — agent, CLI, server and browser — and how a remote session travels through them without the server carrying it.
The agent
What roomlerd actually is, why it is a single process rather than several, how it runs on each OS, and how it keeps itself updated safely.
The connection cascade
How two machines choose a path — measured rather than guessed, never ratcheting down, and with a floor over TLS 443 that always connects.
What the server sees
Precisely what the Roomler control plane can and cannot observe — including the one feature that is deliberately an exception to the rule.