Accessing Maths systems from outside College
For security reasons almost all compute systems at Imperial College are protected by a perimeter firewall so direct access from the public Internet outside the College is not possible to most systems. Also, most of the various wi-fi networks that can be used within the College premises are public Internet services too and include Sky's _The Cloud, eduroam and the govroam wi-fi networks - these too have no direct access to Imperial's internal systems. However, for members of the College and other authorised users there are several ways to access internal systems:
- if you wish to access a College Windows computer remotely you can use the College's Remote Desktop Gateway in conjunction with the Unified Access service
- you also can use the Unified Access service which is a replacement for the two VPN (Microsoft PPTP and OpenVPN) services that used to be offered. This is a more flexible option for research users since it's not limited to accessing just Windows PCs.
- use one of the Maths ssh gateways - this is probably the best option for most Maths Linux and UNIX research users since all of the generally accessible Maths home directory, file and data storage servers are mounted directly on the three gateways. So you can log into one of these via ssh and access your data directly and better still, you can transfer files into & out of the various storage servers from outside College using scp or sftp without having to log into specific clusters or compute servers from the gateway. As of December 2024 all three gateways now use Google Authenticator 2 factor authentication for logins, which you need to set up yourself in conjunction with a smartphone before you start to use it. For enhanced security, two of these gateways use a non-standard TCP access port so ask me for information about this if you don't already know what this is (it won't be stated here for obvious reasons!).
- if you are physically on one of Imperial College's premises, use the College's Imperial-WPA wi-fi network if you intend using a laptop, tablet, mobile phome or other wi-fi capable device as described in the ICT documentation.
- Note: the College's central ssh gateway facility and the two VPN services previously offered by ICT are no longer available to the College at large, having now been superseded by Unified Access; also, the X2Go service that used to be offered in Maths has been temporarily withdrawn while work is ongoing to upgrade it to include support for 2FA (2 factor authentication).
The access routes listed above are for those who have an active (working) central computer account at Imperial College. There are a number of external users of Maths research IT facilities who either do not have, or no longer have, an Imperial College computer account but instead have local Maths department accounts; if you are one these users, then:
- you will be given a login account on the Maths 'collaboration server' share2.ma.ic.ac.uk which supports external user access via ssh to specific Maths systems for which you may have a local Maths login account. Note: without a valid Imperial College computer account, you won't be able to log into any other College system, only those Maths system(s) for which you have a local login account.
Some bespoke remote access solutions are available for specialist applications - these are not publicly advertised for security reasons but if you require a specialist remote access solution that is not available for general use, please enquire.