GoodLink walks the whole journey — sign in, enroll a machine, connect, control, move files — as the system actually behaves. Two planes carry everything, and they never mix.
- Control plane — small JSON messages plus the agent’s single control connection. Presence, commands, and coordination live here.
- Data plane — session media and file bytes: the browser talks to the gateway, and the agent dials outbound to meet it. Bulk bytes never travel through the control plane.
Keeping these planes separate is what makes GoodLink both cheap to run and easy to reason about: the control plane stays small and always-on, while heavy pixel and file traffic takes its own path.
Connect — click a machine, get pixels
From a machine’s page you click Connect, and the data plane comes to life:
- GoodLink mints a one-time credential bound to that specific machine and session and pushes it down the agent’s control connection. The agent applies it to the local engine. No standing engine credential ever exists in the cloud.
- GoodLink mints a self-contained, short-lived session token — an encrypted envelope that carries the whole session descriptor, valid for at most a minute and usable once. Your browser only ever holds this token; it never sees an engine credential.
- The viewer opens a session to the gateway with that token. The gateway decrypts it and drives the session over a proven remote-desktop engine.
- The session’s bytes reach your machine through the outbound tunnel the agent already opened — the gateway hands them to the agent, which splices them to the engine listening on the machine’s own loopback interface. The controlled machine needs zero inbound ports.
Once pixels flow, you get real control: fit / fill / 1:1 / custom scaling, two-way clipboard (text, with an honest size cap), an on-screen keyboard, a per-OS shortcut bar, a real Ctrl-Alt-Del, and touch plus mobile-IME modes so full sessions work from a phone.
Reconnect is a state machine
A network blip is a hiccup, not a funeral. If the network drops, the gateway holds the session open on the machine side for at least a 60-second grace window while the viewer shows a reconnecting countdown instead of an error dialog. When the network returns, the session re-attaches by its own identity and the same desktop resumes — with no engine re-login.
When everything else fails — layer 0
Self-repair climbs a ladder automatically: reconnect the session, restart the screen capture, restart the engine, reboot with permission, and finally hand you an out-of-band recovery link to hardware-level control — power-cycle, BIOS, a screen that works even when the machine’s software is gone. Every rung and every manual power action is audit-logged.
For how GoodLink handles credentials and transport security, see the security overview or the full security page.