Access to FASRC services from Abroad

Access from Outside the USA

Policies: You should be aware of and peruse university guidance and policies related to accessing Harvard resources or doing Harvard business while outside the United States. This is not an exhaustive list. Contact your school security officer for additional guidance or concerns.

• Export Control Policies & Procedures
• Research Policies & Compliance
• Consult your school’s security officer for further guidance or policies at your school
• Harvard HUIT Loaner Device Program

Security: If you are working with protected, confidential, or other data covered by use agreements or licensing, you should consult your local security officer to ensure you are allowed to do so in the country you will be traveling to.

Review the HUIT Prepare to Travel to a Cyber High-Risk Country guidelines (or your school’s equivalent)

VPN:  The FASRC login nodes (login.rc.fas.harvard.edu) do not require you to be on the FASRC VPN in countries where there are no restrictive boundary firewalls, but many other resources that are available on the campus network do require VPN when off-campus. Countries with restrictive boundary firewalls may still block your access to the FASRC VPN. Please set up and test your ability to connect to the FASRC and/or Harvard VPN beforehand.

Speed: There is no way for FASRC to guarantee any expectations of connection speed. Beyond the North American mainland there may be many links and their bandwidth or quality may cause latency or slowness.

Access from China & Restrictive Countries

In addition to the above, please be aware that FASRC VPN and other FASRC services may be inaccessible to users inside China and other countries with restrictive boundary firewalls.

Unfortunately, due to the ever-changing nature of China’s boundary firewall, there is no way to predict what egress is currently disallowed and their rules are especially aggressive towards blocking Western VPNs.

If access to our VPN (or to any other services) is disallowed, this is beyond our control or ability to work around. Please do not assume you will have normal access from China or other countries with restrictive boundary firewalls. Also, please do expect the connection to be slow if it does work.

It is worth noting that SSH access to our login nodes (login.rc.fas.harvard.edu) does not require you to be on our VPN, but there is still no guarantee that these will be accessible from inside China’s network.

Please review the HUIT Prepare to Travel to a Cyber High-Risk Country guidelines (or your school’s equivalent). Contact your school security officer for additional guidance or concerns.