I spent my last 3 1/2 months in one of the houses from the Housing Office in Groningen. If you are, like me, using Linux as your Operating System you may encounter some difficulties on your day of arrival as they don’t supply sufficient information for setting up the VPN connection. After searching on the Internet and with the help of my colleague I got it working using the following settings.

Replace some name (see VPN settings 1) with a useful name like housing-YourStreetName. Also in the first step enter your user name and password. You find both on your contract. You should replace the x in the gateway address with the number of your house. You should find these numbers on housing.dmz. Each number (or complete IP address) is specific to one of the houses. In the second step (VPN settings 2), copy all the settings. You open this window by clicking on advanced in the first window. In the third window, enter the DNS server. I added the Google DNS servers but you can leave them out. As in step one, fill in the IP which is specific for your house. For the last step (VPN settings 4), copy the details and make sure that the house specific IP is entered as the gateway.

This should help you get started with your Internet. Enjoy your time in Groningen!