Remote desktop access to Windows machines on the IMAPS domain

All the IS documentation assumes that your work machine is running the standard IS build and that you are the registered owner on the IS systems. If your machine doesn’t match these assumptions, you will almost certainly run into problems if you try to follow their FAQs.

I’m going to assume your work desktop machine is connected to the “IMAPS” Windows domain - most Windows machines deployed to Maths/Physics/CompSci staff and research students within the past 5 years are.

• What you need to do at work
• Testing it out
• And from home…
• Remote wake

What you need to do at work

First off, you will need to know the name of your work machine. If you don’t know its name, you’re going to have trouble connecting to it! If you’re accessing this page from your work PC, its name is most likely UNKNOWN - javascript needed!</div>.

If the name above is wrong, you can find out the hostname of your work desktop as follows. Sorry, it’s a bit painful, but Windows’s concept of your computer’s name often doesn’t match reality!

• Go to the start menu and enter “cmd.exe” into the search.
• In the resulting “Command Prompt” window, enter hostname
• The “short” name of your PC should be show. Next enter ipconfig and, in the resulting output, search for the bit labelled “Connection-specific DNS suffix”.

Your full hostname is the short name, followed by “.” follwed by the DNS suffix. So, in the screenshot below, my full hostname would be pcauj-vm.dcs.aber.ac.uk

You need to ensure that remote desktop access is enabled. If you aren’t comfortable doing this, please contact impacs-support@aber.ac.uk, giving us your machine’s name, and we can do it remotely, so long as the PC is turned on.

If you’re comfortable doing it yourself, open the Windows 10 “Settings” application, click on “System”, scroll down the left hand panel to find “Remote Desktop” and click on it. In the right hand panel, you should now have a switch labeled “Enable Remote Desktop”. Turn that on. Next, scroll down the right hand panel and click on “Select users that can remotely access this PC”. If the window it opens doesn’t say that you already have access, click the “Add” button. Enter your username into the section labelled “Enter the object names to select” and click “Check Names”. If it finds your details, click “OK”, then “OK” on the original window.

Testing it out

Having done all that, you should now be able to connect to your work PC remotely. It’s probably a good idea to check this works from on campus before you try from home. Go to a different PC to test from and, in its “Search” start menu, search for and open “Remote Desktop Connection”. When you open it, it will prompt you for the computer name. Enter the name of your machine and click “Connect”. It should then prompt you for your credentials.

Enter “IMAPS\your_username” (e.g. IMAPS\auj) as the user name and your Aber password and click “OK”. After a few seconds, you should get a prompt asking you to confirm the identity of the remote computer. Assuming you’re happy with it (!) you can tick “Don’t ask me again for connections to this computer” and click “Yes”. You should then be connected to the desktop on your work machine.

And from home…

Assuming all this has worked, it should just work from home. Connect to the GlobalProtect VPN first, then follow the instructions in the “Testing it out” section above.

Remote wake

If your PC is configured to suspend itself when you’re not at the keyboard, you will need to be able to wake it before you access it from home. Most PCs these days support “Wake on LAN”, where a “magic” packet can be sent across the network, telling the network card to wake the PC.

• For PCs on the IS networks (most Physics and Maths machines) you can visit https://myaccount.aber.ac.uk/protected/paws/. You should be presented with a list of machines registered to you, with a “Wake” button by each. Click the relevant button and, within a few seconds, you should be able to connect remote desktop to it.
  N.B. The “shortcut” downloads that the IS page supplies are not correctly configured to connect to our machines - if you choose to use the shortcut, it’ll try to log you in as “PAU\username” rather than “IMAPS\username” and this will fail.

• For PCs on the DCS networks (most Computer Science machines) I’ve written a similar page: https://wol.dcs.aber.ac.uk/. Again, log in and you’ll get a list of machines registered to you, with the option to wake them.

It’s probably a good idea to test remote wake while on campus. In particular, if IS’s, or DCS’s records are incorrect, you might not be able to find your computer in the list. If this is the case, please get in touch with us (again, supply your computer name) for investigation.