Due to the sensitive nature of the datasets provided within our Trusted Research Environment (TRE), it is important that multiple layers are utilised to provide an adequate “air gap”. Occasionally one of these layers may have issues which prevent you from accessing your workspace. These problems usually manifest themselves in one of the following ways. We’ll try and describe these in this article.
🤔 A blank or black screen is shown while trying to connect
You may or may not be able to see the mouse cursor - that’s ok. We recommend waiting at least 1-2 minutes before taking any action as sometimes your workspace might be under heavy load while processing data etc. However, if your workspace doesn’t appear after waiting a few minutes, we recommend clicking End Session under the user icon at the top right of your window.
You can then return to Service Workbench and refresh the page to ensure a new AppStream link is generated. You can then connect to your workspace in the usual way. Hopefully this time it will work - if not, please do not hesitate to open a support ticket.
AppStream sessions terminate automatically after 30 minutes so there is no need to click End Session under normal circumstances.
♻ It keeps saying “Starting VNC Session” and “VNC session was closed”
If you are able to see this status message, the AppStream session is working fine but your research workspace may be running slow or has crashed. If this happens, we recommend stopping your workspace from Service Workbench. Once this has entered the Stopped state, you can click Start again and try to connect again once its state has returned to Running.
We do not recommend terminating your workspace unless you are absolutely certain you want to do this. Please see our article about the differences between stopping and terminating your workspace.
The web browser simply shows “An error occurred”
If this happens, it is likely that there is a more serious error with your AppStream session. If you are able to end your AppStream session (as in “A blank or black screen is shown while trying to connect”), we recommend closing your browser and waiting 30 minutes for the session to naturally expire. If it happens repeatedly, please contact the service desk.