Virtual Private Networks

What is a VPN?

VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. It's a private connection between your computer - wherever it is - and a computer somewhere else. It's private because it's strongly encrypted, so it can't be read en route.

The University of Edinburgh has a VPN. When you use it, your computer has a private connection to the University's network. To other computers, your computer appears to be on that network.
You should use the University VPN whenever you are working while away from the University, for security.

ssh timeouts from home

If you work from home, you might find that your ssh sessions to the Informatics ssh servers unexpectedly time out. If so, the problem is almost certainly being caused by your home NAT router timing out what it considers to be an 'inactive' session.

The solution is to use 'ssh keepalives' - to configure your ssh client to automatically send some 'no-op' protocol codes to the server every now and again, in order that the NAT router considers the session to be active.

How to configure this will vary from OS to OS.

OpenVPN DNS alternatives

The "Informatics-InfNets-Forum" and "Informatics-EdLAN-Forum" configuration files and the corresponding -AT versions tunnel only Informatics traffic and EdLAN traffic respectively, leaving all your other traffic to go out through your ISP's default route.

We normally recommend those, as they're generally more efficient and robust, but they do have the potential issue that traffic to other sites will have your ISP-provided address, and so anyone basing authorization decisions on that address won't see you as being a University person. "Informatics-AllNets-Forum" (and ...-AT) is provided as a workaround for that situation. It tunnels all traffic over the OpenVPN tunnel, and so to the outside it appears that you have an EdLAN address. Unfortunately that does have some side-effects.

Virtual DICE support

Limited support

We can only really provide support for the most recent version of Virtual DICE. When a new version comes out, users of Virtual DICE should switch to it - being careful to rescue any files from their old VM before deleting it.

Remember that Virtual DICE is intended for fairly simple tasks. If you find yourself needing to make complex changes to it in order to support your work, please focus on DICE rather than Virtual DICE, and please ask ⇒ Computing Support for help.

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