Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences - IT Service Group (RBG)

RDP-Access to Servers

1. Introduction

The Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) offers an alternative to SSH for establishing a connection to the publicly available servers at the Department of Computer Science.

RDP provides a graphical interface whilst SSH will only establish the connection through a terminal. Note: Windows-Terminal-Servers are exclusively accessible through RDP (employees only).

2. Webconnect (Apache Guacamole)

Select servers are accessible through webconnect. A useraccount for the informatik.hu-berlin.de domain is a pre-requisite to use webconnect. After successful login the desired server may be chosen from a list. Alternatively a group of servers (f.eg. GPU-server) may be selected. When selecting a group of servers, an available server from this group will be assigned by the system. To determine which server gets assigned for connection, current load and previous logins will be taken into account. Webconnect also offers SSH as connection type.

3. RDP for Linux
With the HU-email-address (Linux only)

For RDP connections to Linux servers, the HU-email-address may be used instead of the informatik.hu-berlin.de domain account:  <CMSLogin>@hu-berlin.de

Note: CMSLogin needs to be substituted by the 8-digit CMS-accountname (not firstname.lastname as in the commonly used e-mail alias)

rdesktop

The gruenau-servers may be accessed through the Linux tool "rdesktop":

rdesktop -u username -g 1024x768 servername.informatik.hu-berlin.de

Important options::

  • "-u" : username
  • "-g": screen resolution
  • for more options please refer to "man rdesktop"

To install "rdesktop":

  • Ubuntu: sudo apt install rdesktop

 

xfreerdp

The tool "xfreerdp" may be used to access the gruenau servers and the terminal-servers:

xfreerdp /u:username /v:servername.informatik.hu-berlin.de

remmina
4. RDP (RDesktop) for Windows

 

Please refer to our video tutorial for details on how to connect to a Linux server or a Windows server: