To make working from home or from a Flexdesk as easy as possible we have build a Remote Desktop Facility that provides you with a full graphical desktop, which is running inside the University Campus, available from you private device such as a personal desktop or laptop. Many of you have already been using your institute Windows desktop as a graphical desktop server, but this requires you to leave that system power on during your absence. In fact for those that do not have an institute desktop (flexdesk users) there was only limited access to the Texel server possible.

With the implementation of a Remote Desktop Service (RDS), you have access to a farm of servers providing you the same experience as your institute desktop as graphical sever. In fact accessing the RDS farm is even much simpler and the way to access it does not depend on your location, on or off premises.

Below we describe in some detail how to access the RDS farm from the three major operating systems.

For all systems, you need to download a .rdp file from the RDS server. To do this go to its WEB interface at https://rds.physics.leidenuniv.nl and login with your PHYSICS or STERREWACHT domain credentials. Now confirm your 2FA:

After you have logged in you see a page with a remote computer icon. Click on the icon ad a file will be downloaded. The file has a funny name, but has the extension .rdp

The next steps are OS dependent.

Copy the just download file to your desktop and rename is to a name which you associate with remote access to the institute servers. Do not change the extension.

Once the rdp file is on your desktop it is visible as the same icon you saw on the WEB page of the RDS server. Now double click the icon and your remote desktop client will start asking for your credentials:

Enter your PHYSICS or STERREWACHT domain credentials. and click OK.

Now on your phone you will get a request to confirm your 2FA factor. Once you have doen that you will be provided a windows in which the Remote Desktop is started.

If for some reason you would like to change some of the setting for this connection, you can open the remote desktop client and load the .rdp file from your desktop. Then you modify the settings and save yor moddification by overwritting the orriginal .rdp file.

For Linux we use the package reminna to setup the remote desktop connection. So open your remmina program by typing on a terminal commandline:

remmina

Now your 'remmina window is open and select from the Hamburger icon on the right the Import option: With the file browser select the just downloaded .rdp file. After the file is imported you will see an extra entry: Now double click that new entry and you will be presented a login window: Enter your PHYSICS or STERREWACHT credentials and click on OK. And now you are logging in onto a server in the farm, but not after you confirmed your 2FA. The problem with the vanilla configuration is that it does not doe a good job on the scaling. It starts out with displaying a very small desktop: To correct that you have to edit the configuration of the RDS entry in the main window of remmina'' and specify a specific Custom size. In addition you can also 'Enable multi monitor':