Accessing Windows Terminal Servers
This document describes how to access CSE's Windows Terminal Servers. These services are made available to staff and postgraduate research students as a means of running some Microsoft software (e.g. Office) when not using a Microsoft-based computer.Contents:
Basics
There are two terminal servers available:cse-jarre - the primary terminal server with Office and Acrobat. It is purely for basic word-processing type use, and not for long running processes or development. cse-vivaldi - the "development" server with Visual Studio and some other packages. This server isn't guaranteed to be as reliable or responsive for interactive (word-processing) use, as others may be doing more intensive work on it.
Do not save any work on the local drives of these machines. They may be wiped at any time. Any data should be saved in your Z: drive, found in "My Computer".
Accessing from a CSE linux machine
For basic word-processing type applications, just run win. This uses the rdesktop software to conncet to the cse-jarre server.For development work, run win -developer.
Accessing from another machine on the CSE Network
You will need the rdesktop software to connect to windows terminal servers. You can use it by simply telling rdesktop the server to connect to:$ rdesktop cse-jarre.cse.unsw.edu.au
Etiquette
Like any server, the terminal servers are a finite resource; if you quit win without logging off your session will go stale and will hang around holding onto resources needed by other users. Therefore when you have finished working you should log out of win, not just close the window. This is done by selecting "Log off" from the Start menu.Accessing from outside the CSE network
For best performance outside the CSE network, we recommend that you install rdesktop on your computer. There are then a couple of methods of connecting to the server.SSH Tunnel
You can also use the SSH software to create a tunnel port to jarre.The following command should forward the rdp port (3389) on your computer, via the login servers, to the rdp port on the terminal server (you will need to leave the connection open as you use rdesktop.
$ ssh -L 3389:cse-jarre:3389 login.cse.unsw.edu.au
Once that is started, you can connect rdesktop to your own computer. Don't use the ssh terminal that opened up for this, as that is running on the CSE login server...
$ rdesktop localhost