Remote Access - J.B. Speed School of Engineering - University of Louisville (2024)

March 12, 2020

To remote into your on campus PC from home, you need the following things:

1. You need to have a VPN account set up.
2. You need to have the VPN client installed on your mobile/home
3. You need to know the name or IP address of your on campus
4. Your campus PC needs to be set up to accept remote connections, and if you are not an administrator, be granted permission to log on remotely.
5. Your campus PC needs to remain turned on. You do not have to be logged in to it.
6. You will need to connect to the VPN on your mobile/home
7. You will then remote into your work PC from your mobile/home system.

Steps to check if you have a VPN account

1. Log into Ulink
2. Under the section titled “Information Technology” click the link that says “Computer Accounts.”
3. If “VPN 1: Campus” appears under the section “Current Accounts,” you already have a VPN account set up.
4. If “VPN 1: Campus” appears under “Requestable Accounts,” you need to request the account.

To request the account, all you need to do is click the “Open” checkbox corresponding to the “VPN 1: Campus” selection, and click the “Save” button at the bottom.

You will receive an email confirming that your account has been set up later.

Steps to install the VPN client on your home/mobile system

4. First you need your VPN account set up and confirmed from the steps above.
5. Once you have your account, open a web browser and navigate to vpn.louisville.edu and log in using your ULINK credentials.
6. Once logged in, you will be given options on which client to download
   • Most likely, you will need to download the 64 bit version for Windows.
     1. If that one doesn’t work, try the 32 bit version.
7. Once you have downloaded the client, run the installer. You can just click next/finish all the way through.

Steps to find the name of your on campus machine

1. Open up File Explorer
2. On the left hand side, find an entry for either “My Computer” or “This PC.” Right click on it and then click properties.
3. You are looking for the section that says “Computer name, domain, and workgroup settings”
4. In that section, look for the entry that says “Full computer name:” Write down the whole line. It usually looks something like this or similar: “spd-jb-btsmit01.ad.louisville.edu”

• If the entry for “Full computer name:” does not have “ad.louisville.edu” at the end of it, then you instead will need to find your computer’s IP address.
  • To do so, you will need to open a command prompt. You can click on the start button and start typing in the words “Command Prompt” and it should show up in the search window. Open it up and type “ipconfig” without the quotes and hit enter.
  • You are looking for an entry for IPv4 Address that says “136.165.xxx.xxx” with the set of x’s being an additional set of numbers.
  • You must note, that since your PC is not on Active Directory, the IP address that you find COULD change. This is just the nature of the University Network.

Steps to check if you are able to remotely connect to your PC

1. Follow steps 1 and 2 in the “Steps to find the name of your on campus machine” section again.
2. On the left hand side, click “Remote Settings” (if you don’t have administrative rights, it will not let you into this section. Please contact us at spdhelp@louisville.edu to have us configure it for you.)
3. In this box, click the selection towards the bottom that says “Allow remote connections to this computer,” then uncheck the box that says “Allow connections only from computers running Remote Desktop with Network Level Authentication (recommended)”
4. Click the “Select Users” button.
5. In the dialog box that pops up, if it says that your account already has access, you should be good. Hit OK on that box, and then hit OK on the System Properties box as well.
6. If it doesn’t say you already have access, click the “Add” button, then enter your ulink ID in the text box, then click OK. Hit OK on the next two boxes to finish out this section.

Steps to connect to the VPN

1. After installing the VPN client to your home/mobile system, you need to open the client. On your taskbar on the lower right, you are looking for a greyed out globe icon. I have highlighted it in the image below:

2. Double click on that icon, and it will pop up the connection window for the Global Protect VPN client as seen below:

3. In the text box for the portal address, type vpn.louisville.edu and then click “Connect.” It will prompt you for credentials if it can connect properly. You will enter your ULINK credentials there and click OK.
4. Once the globe icon on the taskbar turns blue/green and has a check mark on it, you are connected to the VPN.

Steps to remote into your campus PC (if your computer name ended in “.ad.louisville.edu”)

1. On your mobile/home PC, click on the Windows Start button and start typing “Remote Desktop Connection” and open the app that appears.
2. In the “Computer” section, enter the name that you found from the section titled “Steps to find the name of your on campus machine” and click connect.
3. If your system auto populates the user name for you, you need to click the “More Choices” or the “User other account” button or link.
4. For your username, you must put “ad\” before your ulinkID. For example, I would use ad\btsmit01 if I was logging into my system.
5. Enter your Ulink password and click OK. If all went correctly, you should now be remotely working on your campus PC.

Steps to remote into your campus PC (if you had to use the IP address method)

1. On your mobile/home PC, click on the Windows Start button and start typing “Remote Desktop Connection” and open the app that appears.
2. In the “Computer” section, enter the IP address that you found from the section titled “Steps to find the name of your on campus machine” and click connect.
3. If your system auto populates the user name for you, you need to click the “More Choices” or the “User other account” button or link.
4. For your username, prefix the username to your campus PC with “.\” For example, if my username on the PC was Taylor, I would put .\Taylor as my username.
5. Enter your password for your campus PC and click OK. If all went correctly, you should now be remotely working on your campus PC.

After you have your VPN account, have installed the VPN client, identified the name/IP address of your campus machine, and confirmed that your campus PC allows remote connections, the only steps you need to take to connect to your campus PC is to make sure you are connect to the VPN, and then connect to your PC via the Remote Desktop Connection application. The VPN will stay connected until you either disconnect it yourself, or reboot your home/mobile PC.

If you run into any issues, please send an email to spdhelp@louisville.edu or call 852-7620 at any time and leave a voicemail with details on your issues. We’ll get with you as soon as we can.

Download The Above Instructions (PDF)

Additional Assistance Available through UofL Information Technology Services (ITS)