Troubleshooting Remote Access Portal

Incorrect password

If  you find a password you are confident is correct is not working, try the following:

• Make sure you are entering your username in lowercase only.
• Type more slowly (some people have found keypresses are missed or mixed up by RAP when typed quickly).
• Use SHIFT rather than CAPS LOCK to type capital letters in the password (some people have reported problems with CAPS LOCK failing to be transmitted).
• Check for symbols that may be in a different place on a US keyboard, such as ", @, #, £ and € (some people find the login screen defaults to a US keyboard layout) - consider changing your password if they cause you problems.

Black screen

A black screen in RAP is most commonly caused by either your session or the server as a whole becoming overloaded, which prevents the portal communicating with the server. It may start working again once the CPU/memory usage is reduced, but sometimes it can get stuck in an unresponsive state. In that case, you may need to kill your running processes.

Note: Please don't just switch to another node and leave your processes running indefinitely - this will reduce the resources available to everyone and may result in even more machines becoming overloaded. Contact IT Support if you require assistance.

To kill your processes, open Terminal on a departmental desktop or another server in RAP, or connect via SSH to gate, and run:

ssh HOSTNAME pkill -9 -u USERNAME

Replace USERNAME with your username and HOSTNAME with the RAP node name. For "Linux Remote Access" use the hostname lts (short for Linux Terminal Server).

Wait a few minutes to ensure all processes have stopped, then reconnect in RAP. (You may want to check the Compute & Terminal Services Machines page to see if a different machine has more resources available.)

If this is a recurring issue for you, please make sure your processes aren't trying to use more than 50% of the available CPU and RAM on any of the shared Compute servers, as that will cause them to be throttled. You could also try using an alternative method of connecting to the nodes, such as SSH or X2Go, or consider using the ARC Service for more intensive workloads.

Another possible cause is your account running out of disk space, which prevents the necessary temporary files being created when you try to log in. Please see Disk Quotas, File Storage and Archiving for how to check and possible solutions.

Keys not sent to the remote server

Some key combinations (e.g. Ctrl-W) are intercepted by the local machine or web browser, and therefore are not sent to the remote server. Possible workarounds are:

• Use the mouse, or another key combination if available.
• Press Ctrl+Alt+Shift all together and release them to bring up the RAP menu, then select "On-screen keyboard". Use the on-screen keyboard to enter the keys required. Then press Ctrl+Alt+Shift again and select "None" to close it.
• Use an alternative method of connecting to the server, such as X2Go.

We hope there will be a better solution available in a future version of the portal.

Other problems

Please contact IT Support for assistance.