All help topics

Signing in and your account

The portal uses one of two sign-in modes, set at deployment:

• Institution account (a Sign in with … button) — signing in with the organisation's account, with no passwords in CloudLabs. Someone with a role in the portal gets its modules; anyone else who is allowed in sees only their own labs (My labs).
• Password sign-in — email address and password. A password must have at least 10 characters, including an upper-case letter and a digit. Forgot your password? sends a link valid for 60 minutes. After 5 failed attempts, signing in to the account is paused for 15 minutes.

My profile (the account block at the foot of the menu) changes your name, email address, language and password. A session expires after 8 hours without activity. A role change applies within seconds — someone whose role is taken away is signed out.

Roles and permissions

Permissions come only from a role. Each module has View (sees the module) and Manage (changes it); the audit log has View only. The built-in roles:

Organisation → Roles → New role creates your own role: a name, a description and a table of modules with the columns View and Manage. Manage needs View of the same module; you cannot grant a permission you do not hold, and a role that still has members cannot be deleted.

Example — a teaching administrator (prepares templates, runs labs and reports usage): the Operator role's permissions plus Lab templates (view and manage) and Monitoring (view).

Students and trainers need no roles or portal accounts: their access follows from the labs generated for their email address.

Users

Organisation → Users lists the accounts of people who work in the portal (not students).

• New user: first name, last name, email, language and Role. Choose Send an invitation email (a link valid for 7 days; with password sign-in the user sets their own password), or create the account without an invitation or with a password you hand over yourself.
• Edit — details, language and role. Until the invitation is accepted: Resend invitation.
• Delete — the user loses access immediately. This cannot be undone.
• The Owner role cannot be assigned or changed — it moves only by handing over ownership; the previous owner becomes an Administrator.

Organisation details and logo

The Details tab: the organisation's name, address, country and Time zone (used, among other things, by the audit log's filters). The name, address and phone appear on participants' access pages in the Lab provided by card.

The Organisation logo (PNG, up to 1 MB) appears in emails, on the access page, in the portal menu and on the lab desktop. Logo changes apply immediately, independently of the Save button.

Email templates

The Email templates tab holds the invitations sent to participants: one for students and one for trainers. Each has a Polish and an English version — a participant gets the one in their language, and someone with no language gets the Polish one. An untouched template uses the default text; Reset to default returns to it.

• Fields: Subject, Body and Include the organisation logo.
• Placeholders you can use insert the participant's details, e.g. [FirstName], [LabName], [LabProvider], [TroubleshootingLink], the student's access page link [StudentLink], and for trainers [TrainerLink] and [TrainerAppLink] (the Trainer Tool download). An unknown placeholder is sent as nothing, and a malformed one prevents the email from being sent.
• Send a test to me sends the unsaved text, with sample values, to your own address.

Integrations: mail and USOS

• Outgoing mail — SMTP server, port, user name and password, sender address and name, STARTTLS. The stored password is never shown; leaving the field blank keeps it. Send test message checks the settings by sending a message to your address.
• USOS — API address, consumer key and secret, and class types. It lets you add lab participants and group members from USOS class groups.

Licence

Organisation → Licence shows what your organisation has licensed for CloudLabs: the customer, the environment, the limit of concurrently running labs, the licence type and dates, the maintenance period, the revision and the last synchronisation with CloudTeam.

• Activation. Enter the activation code from CloudTeam. A server without internet access uses the offline route: download the activation request, upload it in the CloudTeam panel and import the licence file you receive.
• Check now fetches the latest licence immediately; otherwise the server checks by itself several times a day.
• Limit. Labs that are already running are never interrupted. When the limit is exceeded by more than the permitted tolerance, a new session cannot be started and the participant is told to contact the organiser.
• New installations. A version that is not activated yet works as before for 60 days; the screen shows the days left.
• Warnings and usage. The screen lists everything that needs attention (an expiring licence or maintenance period, going over the limit, refused starts, a synchronisation that keeps failing) and charts the daily peak of concurrent labs. The same warnings appear as a strip at the top of every page for people who manage the organisation, and are emailed to them at most once a day.
• Usage reports. Counts of concurrent labs are sent to CloudTeam once a month; on an offline server download the files here.
• Moving to a new server. Use Deactivate on the old server first; the licence is freed for the new installation. This cannot be undone.

Audit log

The Audit log records sign-ins (succeeded, failed, refused), access denials, administrative operations and configuration changes — including sign-ins from the Lab Deployment Tool and the Trainer Tool. Records cannot be changed or deleted.

• Filters: search, a date range (in the organisation's time zone), Category and Outcome.
• Details show the operation's data; passwords and secrets are replaced with "(set)".
• Export CSV downloads every record matching the filters.
• Events tied to no organisation (e.g. a sign-in attempt for an unknown address) are visible to the Owner and Administrators only.

Lab Deployment Tool

The Lab Deployment Tool is a Windows application for creating new templates and uploading their virtual machines. Download it with Download Lab Deployment Tool on the templates list.

• Only someone allowed to manage lab templates can sign in to it.
• With institution-account sign-in, the tool needs a local password: My profile → Set local password. That password is for the tool only.
• The tool only creates templates; editing, archiving and instructions are in the portal (see Templates).

More help

If something does not work as described here, see: Troubleshooting.