Astronomy department users can use the campus VPN to access on-campus
resources from remote locations. The advantages of using VPN are that
users could print to departmental printers, samba mount their home
directory, or directly access various hosts without ssh'ing through
the bastion server.
In order to use the VPN, you must first be a member of the Astronomy
VPN group. Send an email to admin at astro.ufl.edu with a
request that you be added to the VPN group, and the Astronomy systems
administrators will submit a request to CNS. This process usually
takes no more than one business day. You will need to provide your
Gatorlink ID.
Once you have received confirmation that you have been placed in the
Astronomy VPN group, you will need to install the VPN software on your
local computer. You can download it from the network-services
web-page at http://net-services.ufl.edu/provided_services/vpn/.
There are full instructions for setting up the VPN client at the
network-services web-site. However, when you connect to the VPN you
will need to append /astro to your gatorlink username; this
lets the VPN server know that you are attempting to authenticate into
the Astronomy VPN group. So, if your gatorlink userid was
roosevelt you would specify your account as
roosevelt@ufl.edu/astro.
Once you have authenticated to the Astronomy VPN group you can then
access all departmental resources as if you were on campus. For
example, you could "samba" mount your home directory from woodstock.
Under Windows you would right click on my computer, select map
network drive and then type
\\woodstock.astro.ufl.edu\username, where username is your
Astronomy username. Under OS-X you would press command-K from
the finder and then type smb://woodstock.astro.ufl.edu/userid.
If you have any comments or questions about using the VPN service,
please send a note to admin.