VPN

Owned by Robert Schade
Last updated: Apr 08, 2024 by Marcel-Brian Wilkowsky
2 min read

General Access via VPN

For access to the HPC systems you need a valid user-account and access to the network of the Paderborn University. This can be done either by presence at Paderborn university (WLAN or wired network) or through a VPN tunnel. In the following, we explain the installation of a VPN tunnel for external users.

Members of Paderborn University must use the regular VPN connection to access the HPC systems.

Prerequisite: User Certificate

First you need a personal user certificate. You can find out how to create one by following this link (only in German): https://hilfe.uni-paderborn.de/Netzwerkzertifikate

You can log in with your project-specific PC2 account.

Setting Up the VPN Tunnel

Linux

We currently do not recommend using the VPN tunnel via NetworkManager. During the test runs, NetworkManager made sure that all data traffic is routed through the tunnel regardless of the settings in the configuration file. However, this is not possible due to the configuration of the VPN server and leads to the fact that you only have connection to the network of the Paderborn University. Therefore we would like to give you a short instruction how to setup the VPN tunnel via the OpenVPN client directly.

  1. First install OpenVPN in a version >= 2.6

  2. Place the user certificate together with this configuration file in one directory: OpenVPN-UPB-NG_hpc-pc2_lin.ovpn

  3. Rename the user certificate to "Network_Certificate.p12". Alternatively, you can adjust the path in the configuration file.

  4. You can now start the VPN tunnel with "sudo openvpn OpenVPN-UPB-NG_hpc-pc2_lin.ovpn" You will be asked for a password. This password is displayed within the creation of the network certificate. Leave the terminal window open as long as you need the tunnel. Using CRTL-C you can close OpenVPN and close the tunnel.

Further information from the University Computer Center on setting up under Linux can be found at https://hilfe.uni-paderborn.de/VPN_unter_Linux/en

Windows / MacOS

Here we would like to refer to the documentation of the IMT. When downloading the configuration file, please select hpc-pc2 as vpn group and uncheck the box "Den gesamten Internetverkehr durch den Tunnel leiten?".

https://hilfe.uni-paderborn.de/VPN_einrichten

Troubleshooting

If there are any other unsolvable problems with the connection setup of the VPN session for our HPC systems, have a look here:

https://upb-pc2.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/PC2DOK/pages/1901214

If there are more unsolvable problems, have a look at the IMT page of the University of Paderborn:

https://hilfe.uni-paderborn.de/VPN_Problembehandlung#Ich_befinde_mich_hinter_einer_Firewall.2C_die_VPN-Verbindungen_blockiert