Before the main content: * With all the funding cuts to PhD studies, I’d appreciate if you can donate here.

I am using Omarchy, a Linux distribution based on Arch for those that want efficiency, and it is similar to Manjaro minus the desktop effects that use considerable resources.

At Surrey and probably other universities in the UK, we require to use Microsoft Authenticator to log to the VPN.

Today I had to connect to Eureka2, a powerful computing cluster, using my personal laptop. The official guide Working off campus with GlobalProtect instructs to download Global Protect from the Surrey App Store, a service that has been retired.

I installed Open Connect which is a FOSS alternative:

sudo yay -S openconnect

I had to adjust my email settings here, and verify that the default sign-in method is ‘Microsoft Authenticator – notification’.

Then I was able to connect using:

sudo openconnect --protocol=gp --usergroup=gateway vpn.surrey.ac.uk

After a few tries, what works it to use the full username (not email name) with ‘@surrey.ac.uk’. What I mean is that my university account is something like ab12345 when my email firstname.lastname, and so I used ab12345@surrey.ac.uk. For the password I had to use the password that I use for Surrey Learn (not the email password) followed by the authenticator timed PIN number.

I was finally able to see:

ESP session established with server
ESP tunnel connected; exiting HTTPS mainloop.

And finally I could type this in another terminal:

ssh mv00622@eureka2.surrey.ac.uk

Which shows:

    +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
      Welcome to Surrey's Eureka2 HPC Cluster
             Based on Rocky 8
    +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Documentation for HPC users is at below site:
https://docs.pages.surrey.ac.uk/research_computing/

I hope this helps. I had to spend over half an hour figuring out the steps by reading different sources and I hope this helps other people.