Prior to lockdown we only had a single “staff” server and a single “student” server but with the need to provide adequate facilities to allow working from home, we had to expand our provision. Based on the work of FreeRDP and rdesktop, xrdp uses the remote desktop protocol to present a GUI to the user. In front of that is a proxy which uses HAProxy to load balance across a cluster of machines. HAProxy is a free, very fast and reliable solution offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications.

Staff can connect using the host ‘uun.remote.inf.ed.ac.uk‘. Which machine you connect to is defined using a CNAME farm which is generated by some scripts and should not change unless, for example, something happens to the remote server. Each server is shared with other people so, as usual, please do not run processes which need a lot of memory or CPU. (For these processes you can use a remote lab computer or a compute server. Students can also access lab machines in AT via a similar mechanism using ‘uun.lab.inf.ed.ac.uk‘.

Further instructions on use can be found at:

http://computing.help.inf.ed.ac.uk/remote-desktop

XRDP service / Computing Systems by is licensed under a