Remote Desktop to Your Work Computer behind COE/CAE firewall

This is a brief tutorial on how one can connect from a home computer (PC or Mac, normally outside the campus network) to a work PC behind the fireware of the College of Engineering network. Two outdated references are here (for PC) and here (for Mac).

For home PC

1. Download PuTTY
2. Run PuTTY.exe
3. In the Host Name (or IP address) field, type

   best-tux.cae.wisc.edu

4. In the Port field, type

   22

5. Choose SSH for Connection Type
6. In the Category navigation panel/tree, select Connection->SSH->Tunnels
7. Now you are in the "Options controlling SSH port forwarding" session
   • In the Source port field, type in

     127.0.0.1:[port]

     where [port] can be any available TCP/UDP port on the home PC. For example, 3390
   • In the Destination field, type in

     [remote pc address]:[remote port]

     where [remote pc address] should be something like 128.104.***.*** and [remote port] should be any available TCP/UDP port on the remote work PC
   • Click the Add button and the above information should appear in the Forwarded ports list
   • [optional] If you want to access more than one remote pc, repeat the above three steps for each remote pc, but make sure the Source port field uses different port number for different remote pc's
8. [optional] You can save the above configuration in PuTTY for future connections. Refere to here
9. Click the Open button, and you will be in the command window. Just log in to your CAE account according to the prompts
10. Leave the PuTTY window open (or minimized, NOT closed). Run the Remote Desktop Connection program. In the Computer field, just type in the Source port value that is forwarded by the remote pc, for example, 127.0.0.1:3390. Click Connect and you are done

For home Mac

Basically, the process is similar to the above for PC. The only two differences are: 1) there is no need to use PuTTY under Mac, since Mac has its own ssh client (best of unix-like systems) and 2) the Remote Desktop Connection program is the Mac version. The second difference can be ignored. So all the things we have done in PuTTY for PC can be simplified by a command in the Mac Terminal:

ssh -L [local TCP/UDP port]:[remote pc ip address]:[remote TCP/UDP port] [username]@best-tux.cae.wisc.edu

ssh -L 3390:128.104.178.40:3389 badger@best-tux.cae.wisc.edu