Waldemar Schlackow

Whilst working in the Mathematical Department over the last few years, it seems that remote access to departmental services has become very important. The usual approach which companies take for remote access is VPN, but it is not trivial to setup for a user at home, especially if we want to support most operating systems. Also there are certain conditions on the client-side network for VPN to work, and one certainly shouldn't run two VPN connections at a time.

Most other solutions like SSH port forwarding, are nicer behaved, but also perhaps a bit complicated for a user, who needs quick access to the Terminal Server or to a restricted website.

I've recently come across a brilliant solution to this. This was originally developed by 3SP as SSL Explorer, but that has since been made commercial, and a few people have started an open source fork of the original product. It used to be called Adito, and has now become OpenVPN ALS. The main idea is simple: it is entirely web based and a Java applet creates port forwards and launches client applications as necessary. It also has certain web proxy solutions which make remote access to websites very simple. The product is highly configurable and a very simple extension API allows the creation of further clients very easy.

In our department the main means of remote access to a full desktop environment are RDP (to the Windows Terminal Server) and NX (to Linux Servers/Desktops). It was hence important to have these clients in Adito, but they only existed as separate applications for different platforms and that caused some complication, as one needed to advise the user to choose the right application for his platform. I have hence combined/extended what was there into single cross-platform (Windows, Linux and Mac OSX) applications for:

* RDP [native] (without the client software, for quick startups)
* RDP [embedded] (with the client software in case there is no RDP client on the user workstation)
* NXClient [embedded] (this is mostly the extension developed by Robert Zierler with Mac support added.)

All of these are based on work by other people, but I have combined those into single applications and done some extensions for Mac and Linux.

I am attaching these here in case anyone else finds them useful.