This how to is designed to show users how they can connect to their office computer from home. At the time of this writing these directions will only work if the office computer on campus is a Windows computer. These directions also assume the following:

• - Power.  You cannot work from home if the power is out.
• - You have a Cable or DSL Internet connection at home.  Dial up will not provide adequate bandwidth for this to be useful.
• - Your office computer is running Microsoft Windows XP or newer.
• - Your office computer is left ‘On’ when you are not in the office and that it does not go into ‘Standby’ or ‘Hibernation’ after a specific amount of time.

If the above checks out, then you will need to know what the IP address is of your office computer.  To get this, simply browse to the following web site from your office computer and write down the IP Address:

http://whatismyip.org

You will also need to turn on Remote Desktop on your office computer.  Follow these directions for your version of Windows:

Windows XP – http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/mobility/getstarted/enableremote.mspx
Windows Vista or Windows 7 – http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/turn-on-remote-desktop-in-windows-vista

Now that you have the IP address and remote desktop is turned on, you have everything you need to connect to your computer from home!  So, when you get home, open up a web browser and go to the following URL:

https://secure.colostate.edu

You will log in to this site using your CSU eID and CSU eID password.  During the login and setup of the following you will be asked several times if you want to allow something or install something (usually Juniper and Java related); for all queries, allow them, and yes, install them!

Once logged in you will look about halfway down the screen for a section called ‘Terminal Sessions’ – On the top right (gray section) of this area, click on the button to ‘Add a Terminal Session’ – this will take you to the following page.  Fill in this information as follows, replacing IP_ADDRESS with the IP for your office computer, and of course, your username/password fields must be filled out with the username and password you log into your office computer with.  If you connect to a domain at work, then your username must be prepended by the domain name.  For example, if you use the CSU eID to log in to your office computer, your username will be ‘COLOSTATE\eid’ (no quotes; eid is your CSU eid name).  If you log into any other domain, simply change ‘COLOSTATE’ to your domain.

The green arrows point out the information that you will need to change.  Below this screen you will see a LOT of extra options.  Choose the ones you think will be useful.  If after you connect, you find anything strange you can always change these options.

You can now click on this new Terminal Session to launch your Remote Desktop!  As a reminder, if this is the first time doing this, you will be prompted a couple of times to install or allow some things, please do so.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 at 4:58 pm and is filed under General Computing, Internet & Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.