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Table of Contents
bwLehrpool via remote access
Preface
Due to the current situation (Corona/Covid crisis) most universities are barred to public traffic, and their computer pools are closed. Many lecturers therefore relocate their lectures into the web after recording them on video. But for practical work, students are missing their accustomed learning environments in form of the software normally provided in computer pools. Installing this software on student's computers is often not possible due to license constraints, missing installation packets, or often just lacking of configuration skills.
As the bwLehrpool client computers are in principle usable, but not reachable for students, a possibility was developed to access these unused computers from everywhere via a simple web browser. This was achieved using Apache Guacamole1), which works as a kind of VNC-proxy/gateway. Via this gateway users are connected to pool computers. Display and input works simply per an HTML5 capable web browser, for which neither especially capable hardware is required nor any previous software installation.
Usage
Requirements
Besides an HTML5-capable browser as eg. Firefox, Opera, Edge, Chromium or Apple Safari a reasonably fast internet access is needed.
URL, Login, choice of romm
The URL needed for accessing bwLehrpool-remote is different for every university. Please ask local support if in doubt. Javascript is required; watch out for javascript blocking browser extensions like NoScript.
Screencast
There's a little screencast from user's view (german):
Present limitations and problems
- If there are no accessible computers at a given time or all readily available computers are already used, new clients will be booted in the background (using WoL). This may take some time.
- As of now PVS is not usable remotely.
- At the moment there is no hardware acceleration for graphics cards.