Obviously if public the material would be important. But private, only over ssh or vpn? Free internet, power, and backup!
What specifically are you attempting to achieve, because right now, what little you have shared sends up red flags and rings the alarm bells … loudly.
I have a server in my school office. I currently only use it to backup important files. I am asking if running public or private containers on it would be safe and acceptable.
If authorized by the school IT department and policy, yes. Ask them, not us.
Yes, already have. It seems they don’t care.
If that’s how you want to run your server that’s your choice, but if it were me, I’d think long and hard about the legal implications of doing this.
So far you’ve not said anything about what you’re trying to achieve and that’s not helping.
It seems they don’t care.
Then get that in writing.
Well, I am asking also security wise. I know most schools snoop. Can they somehow see traffic through ssh or VPN? Or just the protocols, logs, dates, etc
The SSH and VPN traffic is encrypted. Unless your private keys have been compromised, nobody can see what is going over the tunnel. They can log things like the IP addresses that are connecting to it and how much data is being transferred though.
It’s likely illegal. The administration would call it theft of service because it’s not authorized and they wouldn’t be wrong. I also don’t see why you would want to do it. You’re giving the IT department at your school complete access to your web history.
I’ve worked for a university before and it was very common for staff to remote into their systems from home – usually with SSH for CS types or Remote Desktop/Team Viewer/etc. for less computer-focused folks. (The former usually didn’t have much issue – the folks using the latter mechanisms got compromised a number of times… -.-) There was also a campus provided VPN that was required to access certain systems with instructions to students and staff on how to use it, but other systems just got public IP addresses.
If what you’re doing is related to your work and campus IT doesn’t object, you’re probably fine to do it. I’ve run various kinds of websites and web apps for colleagues to collaborate on research projects. Being able to do things like that is kind of the point of the internet.
Having seen a number of students, uh, push the limits and find the boundaries of acceptability the hard way though… I’d strongly advise you not to install cryptominers, run TOR exit nodes, or torrent TV shows/movies/etc. That kind of thing tends to get your systems in hot water with IT or other parts of the bureaucracy…
