VPN information for the College of Engineering

There are two basic types of VPN offered to anyone affiliated with the College of Engineering; WiscVPN and CAE VPN. WiscVPN, also known as Campus VPN allows you to connect to the UW campus network. While some of CAEs resources are available this way, most require some type of CAE VPN. CAE VPN is further broken down into CoE VPN, License (Software) VPN and Collaborator VPN. 

WiscVPN

All UW Madison students, faculty and staff should have access to WiscVPN. In addition to general campus use, WiscVPN can be used to access a few CAE resources, such as filespace and groupspace.     

CoE Full or Split VPN

The College of Engineering VPN network is automatically given all College of Engineering faculty and staff, and graduate students who have an appointment in the CoE (such as TAs). It allows complete access to engineering resources, as if you were physically connected to the engineering network.

If you are a faculty or staff member, or grad student who does not already have this access, you can activate your access using the information in Activation of VPN access . CoE VPN is generally not available to undergraduate students.

Split Tunnel means that only network traffic that is destined for a computer on the UW-Madison campus will be sent through the VPN tunnel.  All other network traffic will travel normally over the internet and will appear to come from your computer's IP address.

Full Tunnel means that *all* internet traffic will travel through the VPN tunnel, regardless of its destination and all of the traffic will appear to come from a College of Engineering IP address.

License VPN

Also known as software VPN or student VPN, the License VPN is a more restricted version of the CoE VPN. It only allows a user to connect to the CAE license servers and a few other services, such as groupspace and userspace. License VPN will not allow access to research clusters and other CoE resources. The license VPN is available to undergraduate students, and is a split tunnel connection.

The advantage of this is that students can locally install and run some CAE owned and controlled software while your computer is connected to the network or Internet.

The license VPN must be activated prior to first use. Activation information can be found here: Activation of VPN access

Collaborator VPN

Collaborator VPN is also a special restricted version of the CoE VPN for users that have affiliations in the College of Engineering, but do not have access to UW paid resources. This version will give access to researcher's systems, but will not give access to CAE resources, software, or any other UW paid resources (library, etc.). Because of the software restriction, a collaborator account will not be able to SSH into a CAE Tux lab computer.

There are, however, provisions (see below) for those who are used to doing this, but no longer have software/lab access.   See CoE VPN "Collaborator" for more information.

If you don't already have access to VPN, but you believe you should, the problem may be that your VPN has not been activated. This will only need to be done once. Note: it can take up to 1 hour after filling out the form for activation to sync.

Instructions for how to activate you VPN can be found here: Activation of VPN access.