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Remote Access

Technology Resources to Work From Home

As limitations are placed on travel and access to resources, there are several steps that can be taken to work from home.

Please confirm everything below works for you and for your group. Email support@seas.wustl.edu with details on anything that does not, and if connected to the VPN, please provide the IP address of your connection as detailed in the VPN client's status page. Print this notice and keep a copy available at all your working locations.

Communications

  • Share electronic and paper copies of contact lists for your research group – all phone numbers, and email addresses (WashU and private) and keep copies at home and work. Develop emergency call trees amongst your group to facilitate emergency communications.
  • Familiarize yourself and your group with various online communication tools available to WashU, and install the apps on your desktop, laptop, and mobile devices.
  • Both Zoom and Teams allow for the creation of groups for online chats, and Teams allows for the sharing of files and other resources.
  • WashU's Box service allows for sharing of files up to 15GB, and can be used as another document storage location.

Connectivity

Engineering Research Services Requiring VPN

  • RIS storage, as accessed from clients at \\storage1.ris.wustl.edu. Remember to add "ACCOUNTS\" to the front of your WUSTL Key user name when accessing from a non-domain machine.
  • Engineering research/academic home directories, at \\nfs.seas.wustl.edu\home-compute or \\nfs.seas.wustl.edu\home-lab. The same instructions apply as to accessing RIS storage.
  • Access to the RIS compute cluster via SSH to compute1-client-1.ris.wustl.edu
  • Access to any lab resources that are on internal Engineering networks, such as private-network servers, desktops, or other equipment. Please test access as soon as possible if you have never connected via the VPN to these services before.

Engineering Research Services Open to Internet:

  • The ENGR research cluster web interface
  • SSH access to the research cluster at ssh7.seas.wustl.edu, ssh72.seas.wustl.edu (WUSTL Key authentication)
  • Other terminal access at ssh.seas.wustl.edu, ssh2.seas.wustl.edu, pine.seas.wustl.edu (Engineering authentication)
  • Other lab-specific public research hosts.

All Engineering externally-facing SSH hosts have security implementations that block hosts with 3+ counts of login failure. If you are caught by this, connect to the VPN to avoid the issue immediately, and email support@seas.wustl.edu with your location's IP address (http://whatismyip.com)

Connecting to Desktop Computers

Through the VPN, you can remote desktop to your Windows desktop computers in your office, given that those computers are powered on and not in sleep mode. Some additional setup is required, and you must record the IP address and host name of the computer to connect remotely.

Taking Computers Home

If your department agrees, you can take equipment home. Generally speaking this should "just work". If you happen to have a desktop with a real static IP (not a statically assigned DHCP address) you will have to reconfigure your networking for your own home network – most home networks by default provide DHCP service.

Windows domained joined machines keep a cache of credentials which does not time out. If you wish to keep those credentials fresh, you should occasionally lock your screen (having your screensaver lock is a good practice anyway) and relogin to unlock, while connected to the WUSTL VPN, which will refresh those credentials.

If your WUSTL Key is up for changing during this time, and your Windows desktop is joined to the ACCOUNTS domain, you can change the password (while connected to the VPN), and use Ctl-Alt-Del, and choose Change Password. After that, you can lock/unlock the screensaver to again refresh your credentials.

EIT STRONGLY SUGGESTS that you contact 933-3333 for this particular scenario so that they can support you through the process.

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