(credit Ron Kozsan)
One of the solutions developed this spring in support of remote work/study is the RemoteLab service. This service is intended to provide students with remote access to computers with specialised software that cannot be installed on their own personal equipment due to licensing restrictions or hardware requirements. This service is not intended to provide general purpose computing resources (email, word processing, etc) to large numbers of students.
This solution, implemented on the F5 load balancers, allows groups of workstations to be treated as pooled resources or “labs”. Access to specific labs is controlled by Active Directory group membership, usually groups representing specific courses or course sections. Users logging-in to https://remotelab.uvic.ca will be presented with icons corresponding to the labs they have been authorised to access. As client connection requests are distributed among the constituents of the resource pool, it is best to ensure workstations comprising a given pool are of similar hardware and software configuration.
This service improves our cybersecurity posture by eliminating the need to expose large numbers of Windows computers to the Internet for remote desktop access.
How it works:
- A user connects with their web browser to: https://remotelab.uvic.ca
- Once user authentication and authorisation has occurred, the user is presented access to only the resources they are authorised to use
- When a user clicks on an icon corresponding to a given resource, the load balancer instructs the client’s computer to launch their Remote Desktop Client software and connect to that resource
- The user can then log-in to that end resource with their credentials.
All remote desktop connections are brokered by, and continue to flow through, the load balancer. As this service is making use of the F5 APM (Access Policy Manager) module, it is ready to support 2-factor authentication once an enterprise-wide software-based MFA solution is in place.
A number of labs are in active use or being tested at present, with a number of other departments considering onboarding.
| Department | Lab(s) | # of workstations |
| Systems | CLE A031, A105 | 60 |
| Geography | DTB A251, A253 | 50 |
| Library | Nvivo | 5 |
| Economics | Grad Lab BEC A317 | 15 |
If you are interested in this service, please contact Network Services via email: netadmin@uvic.ca