Here you'll find instructions on how to get to your home directory, or use our computational resources in general from outside the EPFL network.
Most of the computers at EPFL are protected by a Firewall that should help keeping out malicious users and viruses (warms).
The firewall does not allow to connect to a protected internal server or workstation. Nevertheless, authorized users can by-pass this limitation by establishing a VPN or ssh tunnel.
Once the tunnel si estabilished, you can access your files using rsync, scp, or sftp. No ftp servers are available on our network.

The tunnel can be created using the VPN client provided by EPFL which is available for official EPFL members only (see here for more details). Once the VPN tunnel is established, your computer will appear as being withing the EPFL network and will be able to access most of the services within the school including to on-line journals.
Some of our services are restricted also to machines that are not within our subnet so, for example, you will not be able to mount your home directory via NFS even if you're using the EPFL VPN client.

We have few servers that can be reaced from outside the firewall with an ssh client (see below). They can be used as gateways to the internal EPFL network by anyone having a valid account on our cluster.

Every lab has a Access Server that should be used preferably:

To connect via ssh to a specific (protected) machine, you need first to connect to the access server, and then from this to your actual destination.

Ssh can also be used to create secure tunnels for all other protocols, see here for more details.

The ssh protocol can be used to connect to our Access Server, and from this connect to all others servers of our network.
Linux and Os X come with a ssh client out of the box, for MS Windows you can download putty from this page. The connection made by ssh protocol are encrypted, so nobody can sniff what you are doing. No clear-text connections (telnet) is accepted by our machines.
At this page you can find all the information you need for connecting to the network and look at this page for a useful hint.