Working from home

CSCF supports the School of Computer Science's work from home plans.

For support, please contact the CSCF Help Desk at cscfhelp@uwaterloo.ca. Your request will be assigned to a point of contact to support your IT needs for the duration of this work from home period.

Tools for working from home

We recommend reviewing IST's knowledge base article on working remotely. The following are additions to that information.

Computer Science VPN

The School of Computer Science offers a Virtual Private Network (VPN). This supports remote desktop access from within the Computer Science network.

The service uses open-source OpenVPN TLS VPN hosted on SCS servers allowing users on a wide variety of platforms to establish an encrypted tunnel to vpn.cs.uwaterloo.ca over which all their Internet traffic will be routed. The default configuration also replaces clients' existing name server (DNS) configuration with a secure link to University of Waterloo name servers. When off-campus, users can be confident that Internet communications from their laptop, phone, tablet or computer are as secure as from their campus devices.

Campus VPN

If full tunneling of all Internet traffic is not needed, the University offers a VPN for accessing campus resources, which does not route non-campus traffic through the VPN.

Note that the campus VPN needs to use the "UW-General-Campus" profile, rather than "UW-Campus".

Remote Desktop

Please see our notes on remote desktop access.

Office 365

The University offers Office 365 to staff, faculty, and students.

You can access your Office 365 account through your browser at portal.office.com, via mobile apps and personal devices as described on the campus Office 365 page. If this is the first time you're accessing Office 365 and you are an undergraduate student, you will need to follow instructions on that page to activate.

Online Collaboration