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Appleton Tower subnets and VLANs

The School of Informatics has some 40 or so different IP subnets in use.

Each of these serves a particular purpose but, for users in Appleton Tower, the six most important subnets are:

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Informatics Forum subnets and VLANs

The School of Informatics has some 40 or so different IP subnets in use.

Each of these subnets serves a particular purpose but, for users in the Informatics Forum, the five most important subnets are:

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Installing PuTTY

PuTTY is both an ssh client and a terminal emulator. You can use it to remotely login to Informatics machines using ssh. See also: using ssh from Windows.

You can log in using your DICE password ("keyboard-interactive"), or use Kerberos if you have that installed and configured (for example, if you've configured your machine for AFS).

Instructions on configuring PuTTY for Kerberos are below.

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Connecting from outside the University - an overview

An important aim of the Informatics computing infrastructure is that you should be able to easily and securely use your data, and make use of computing resources, from outside of the School's internal network. To do this, you need to have certain software packages installed on your home computer. Although there are pages on this site telling you how to install this software, they don't necessarily explain what each piece of software does, why you might need them, and how they interact. This page tries to fill that gap.

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Self-managed security

If you have a self-managed machine, it is your responsibility to ensure that it is kept secure against unauthorized access. This is especially important if your machine has any associated "holes" in the Informatics firewall which permit external users to have direct access to specific services you run. For example, a web server or an SSH daemon on your machine may be externally accessible. We strongly recommend that you follow these guidelines.

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NTP

We run a local NTP time-synchronisation network, and recommend that self-managed machines are set up to use it rather than remote timeservers. There are four machines, ntp[0123].inf.ed.ac.uk, and for robustness you should set up your machine to synchronise to as many of these as your system will allow.

These are not accessible from outside EdLAN. If you would like to use our timeservers from outside, extntp[01].inf.ed.ac.uk are the service names to use.

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Using ssh on a Mac

Use ssh to from your Mac to Informatics hosts. We recommend that you use Kerberos with ssh as it makes it more secure.

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Using ssh from Linux

Most Linux distributions have an SSH client installed by default. For Fedora and Redhat it is in the openssh-clients package; on Debian and Ubuntu it is in the openssh-client package.

Before you can use ssh, you must be using a VPN - either the University VPN or the School's OpenVPN. The VPN page can help with that.

Then, to access an Informatics SSH server, start a terminal, and enter something like the following (replacing 'yourusername' with your DICE Informatics username):

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Using ssh from Windows

If you are using Windows 10 or 11, we recommend you use the built-in ssh client. It can be used from either the Command Prompt or Windows PowerShell applications. It's based on OpenSSH, so you can manage your ssh keys in the same way as on Linux (for details see Using ssh on Linux).

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External login (ssh) service

This page is about the three SSH gateways into the School of Informatics, which are:

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