bwLehrpool via remote access

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.

Besides an HTML5-capable browser as eg. Firefox, Opera, Edge, Chromium or Apple Safari a reasonably fast internet access is needed.

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.

After entering the web adress (URL) you see in your browser window the login to bwLehrpool-remote analog to the picture at the right. Enter your user credentials and click “Anmelden”. Login problems can be caused by the web interface differently handling special characters contained in your password. Hint: Enter your password resp. doubtful special characters into the user name box (do not send!).
After Login you will perhaps find several rooms. There may be a difference in selectable software environments for each room due to bwLehrpool's ability of showing different environments. Remember that if you do not find your accustomed environment; if in doubt ask your lecturer which room you should chose. Attention: Adjust at this step the dimensions of your browser window to the size you want! Your display may vary from the adjacent example, as each university/institution offers different rooms.
Freely accessible rooms Mark the room you want per single left click and press “Weiter”.
Rooms secured by password Some rooms may be locked by password. In that case mark the room in question, enter the password and click on “Weiter”. This possibility could be used to restrict access to some software which is severely limited by license agreements.
Choosing the environment Further operation just as usual - just as if you were locally present in the computer room..

There's a little screencast from user's view (german):

• 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.