VPN information for the College of Engineering
This document is a one-stop-shop for VPN information for the college of Engineering.
What is VPN
A FAQ on CAE VPN can be found here: https://kb.wisc.edu/cae/page.php?id=8312
Types of VPN available to the CoE
There are two basic types of VPN offered to anyone
affiliated with the College of Engineering; WiscVPN and CAE VPN. WiscVPN, also
known as Campus VPN allows you to connect to the UW campus network. While some
of CAE’s resources are available this way, most require some type of CAE VPN. CAE VPN is further broken down into CoE VPN, License (Sofftware) VPN and Collaborator VPN.
Wisc VPN: All UW Madison students, faculty and staff should have access to WiscVPN. In addition to general campus use, WiscVPN can be used to access a few CAE resources, such as filespace and groupspace.
CoE VPN: The
College of Engineering VPN network is automatically given all College of
Engineering faculty and staff, and graduate students who have an appointment in
the CoE (such as TAs). It allows complete access to engineering resources, as
if you were physically connected to the engineering network.
If you are a faculty or staff member, or grad student who
does not already have this access, you can activate your access using the
information in http://kb.wisc.edu/cae/page.php?id=23424 .
CoE VPN is generally not available to undergraduate students.
With CoE VPN, you must log in with your CAE credentials. You
will have the option of Full and Split tunnel connections.
Split Tunnel means that only network traffic that is
destined for a computer on the UW-Madison campus will be sent through the VPN
tunnel. All other network traffic will
travel normally over the internet and will appear to come from your computer's
IP address.
Full Tunnel means that *all* internet traffic will travel through the VPN tunnel, regardless of its destination and all of the traffic will appear to come from a College of Engineering IP address.
License VPN: Also
known as software VPN, the License VPN is a more restricted version of the CoE
VPN. It requires CAE credentials, and only allows a user to connect to the CAE
license servers and a few other services, such as groupspace and userspace.
License VPN will not allow access to research clusters and other CoE resources.
The license VPN is available to undergraduate students, and is a split tunnel connection.
The advantage of this is that students can locally install
and run some CAE owned and controlled software while your computer is connected
to the network or Internet.
The license VPN must be activated prior to first use.
Activation information can be found here:
Collaborator VPN:
Collaborator VPN is also a special restricted version of the CoE VPN for users
that have affiliations in the College of Engineering, but do not have access to
UW paid resources. This version will give access to researcher's systems, but
will not give access to CAE resources, software, or any other UW paid resources
(library, etc.). Because of the software restriction, a collaborator account
will not be able to SSH into a CAE Tux lab computer. There are, however,
provisions (see below) for those who are used to doing this, but no longer have
software/lab access. You must use CAE credentials to log into a collaborator
account.
| Graduate Students / Staff | engr-full.vpn.wisc.edu engr-split.vpn.wisc.edu |
| Undergraduates | engr-lic.vpn.wisc.edu |
| Collaborators | engr-collab.vpn.wisc.edu |
Activating VPN
As mentioned above, if you don’t already have access to VPN, but you believe you should, the problem may be that your VPN has not been activated. This will only need to be done once.
Instructions for how to activate you VPN can be found here: https://kb.wisc.edu/cae/page.php?id=23424.
Troubleshooting
Here are some solutions to common problems:
1. GlobalProtect fails to install: See troubleshooting ideas here:
2. Cannot login to GlobalProtect, authentication failed: Make sure to request VPN access (https://kb.wisc.edu/cae/23424).
3. Cannot access best-tux or Linux lab machine: Collaborators do not
have access to lab machines. If you are trying to use best-tux to get to a
cluster, see the Important Note in the collaborator doc above (https://kb.wisc.edu/cae/page.php?id=13824)
for information on sshvpn.cae.wisc.edu. You do not need VPN for sshvpn.cae.wisc.edu to work.
4. Linux installation issues: https://kb.wisc.edu/helpdesk/page.php?id=85193
5. Userspace, groupspace and myfiles can all be reached from UWnet,
WiscVPN or any of the CoE VPN types.
6. No VPN of any kind is needed for XenApp or Citrix Workspace.
Getting Help
Internal use only: https://kb.wisc.edu/cae/internal/page.php?id=59233