A firewall is generally a good idea. However, waking up and suddenly having lost access to my email and files (both hosted on my own server on the campus of my university) is definitely not fun. After I couldn’t connect to my server at all, I went there and it was running just fine. I even could connect from the server to my desktop at home using RDP.

A phone call to my helpdesk solved the mystery: The IT department of my university had installed a firewall on Monday for my entire department preventing access to on-campus machines (except the official department servers). [Note that the university has long since had a firewall in place, but an extremely open one.] Apparently though they hadn’t severed all existing connections until last night, which is why I only discovered this today. The workaround is to use the VPN offered by Lehigh University. Unfortunately, they didn’t bother providing an easy way to configure it (e.g. using the Connection Manager Administration Kit) besides a few screenshots. Whoever follows their instructions will therefore be stuck with a VPN that doesn’t use split tunnel, and hence cause some serious performance issues. For anyone associated with Lehigh reading this, I provide the needed Connection Manager configurations (with and without split-tunnel) on my new Lehigh VPN page.

To all the network administrators reading this: If you install a firewall that has such a drastic impact, especially if you do this on a university campus, please tell ALL your users beforehand. My university’s IT department might have told faculty members about this, but they should have clearly informed all staff, faculty and students, especially when the Computer Science department is affected! I would have been much happier to find out about this change in an email last week.