Tips for Setting Up Your Workstation

All new students are given a computer for research purposes. Before you arrive, your supervisor should ask you what hardware/software option you want. See Graduate student workstation options for your options.

Setting Up Your Desk

If you have a desk in the CrySP lab, you can check out peripherals, such as a monitor (or two if you want), a mouse, and a keyboard from CSCF. Ethernet ports in the lab run on a MAC address allowlist. You will need to contact CSCF to have your workstation's MAC address added.

Installing Your Own OS

Unlike other institutions and departments, you are permitted to change your computer. For example, it is completely fine (and common) to wipe the SSD as soon as you arrive and install your own OS. However, if you modify the core system, you will not receive CSCF support for that system. Only reinstall the OS if you are confident enough to manage your own computer.

Note that in general, hardware issued by an employer should be viewed as untrusted, and it is not recommended to use work-issued hardware for personal use. (It may also be a violation of your employer's policies. Here are the University of Waterloo's guidelines around the use of computing and network resources.)

Reasons to Install Your Own OS

• The University of Waterloo installs SentinelOne (S1) Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) on managed PCs. You may find this invasive.
• You may want to customize your computer in some way or generally have more control over it.
• You may want to encrypt your computer's SSD.

Reasons Not to Install Your Own OS

• You will have to manage the device yourself and will not receive CSCF support.

Some Things to Set Up

Here are some tools you may want (or need) to set up and notes about them.

• CrySP Wiki: Please create an account and contribute to this wiki!
• Email: If you don't want to use Outlook, you can access your email through other clients, such as Thunderbird. See UWaterlooEmail.
• Nextcloud: The CS department has a NextCloud instance accessible at https://vault.cs.uwaterloo.ca/. Students get 500GB of file storage by default. Use your CS-GENERAL password to log in. See Vault for more info.
• Printing: See LabOrganization#Printing.
• VPN: There are two VPN services that may be useful. Both require 2FA authentication and still support Duo HOTP codes (confirmed on 2025-09-04). (See Duo2FA.)
  • Campus VPN: If you need access to resources on campus, you can use the campus VPN. (This uses Cisco AnyConnect; on Debian-based systems, you can add this to NetworkManager after installing the network-manager-openconnect and network-manager-openconnect-gnome packages.) This VPN does not tunnel traffic outside the UW network. Use your regular (ADFS) UW credentials and a Duo 2FA code to authenticate.
  • CS VPN: The CS department also runs a VPN (using OpenVPN), which does tunnel traffic outside the UW network. This can be useful for accessing papers while off campus. Use your CS-GENERAL password and a Duo 2FA code to authenticate.
• Web Space: Faculty members and graduate students in computer science have access to web space; if you set it up, your site will be publicly accessible at https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~userid where userid is your userid. You can manage this on linux.cs. See https://uwaterloo.ca/computer-science-computing-facility/getting-help/how-to-guides-and-tutorials, "New Users' Guide to Computer Science Computing Resources" > "Managing web space".