Hatrack River Forum: Tell me about VPNs.

This is topic Tell me about VPNs. in forum Books, Films, Food and Culture at Hatrack River Forum.

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Posted by James Tiberius Kirk (Member # 2832) on :

OK, so I have a bunch of programs (MATLAB, NX4.0, Ruckus, etc) that require a license from the campus network, so I normally can't use them at home.

As it turns out, RPI has a VPN, and I'm told it lets students connect to the school network as if I was at a local workstation, so I can use licensed software while I'm away. Is this true?

--j_k

Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :

If you can use them on the same computer while on the campus network, then definitely yes. Otherwise, it depends somewhat on how they have things set up, but likely yes.

Posted by James Tiberius Kirk (Member # 2832) on :

Cool. [Smile]

--j_k

Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :

Sorta.
At my old campus, the VPN simply allowed you to connect to the campus network via SSH and start applications as if you were on the network it self. Anything graphical required you to start your own X-server.

However, it ended up being rather slow because both the connection is remote and school servers tend to be slow around assignment hand-in time.

Look around your school labs/support offices. Ours had a student version that you could use only while you were a student for cheap.

Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :

You seem to be talking about using SSH to attach to a remote X-client, not a VPN. If your school required you to be on a VPN before you could SSH, that's oddly redundant.

The applications he's talking about are not remote applications. They are local apps that at least require being on a local network for their built-in license checks to work. Assuming the part of the IP range set aside for VPN qualifies for those license checks, he should be okay.