It's fun to watch someone trying to connect to a linux server via Windows Remote Desktop

Worst WTF dev experience? The login process from hell to a well-fortified dev environment at a client's site.
I assume a noob admin found a list of security tips and just went like "all of the above!".

You boot a Linux VM, necessary to connect to their VPN. Why necessary? Because 1) their VPN is so restrictive it has no internet access 2) the VPN connection prevents *your local PC* from accessing the internet as well. Coworkers have been seen bringing in their private laptops just to be able to google stuff.
So you connect via Cisco AnyConnect proprietary bullshit. A standard VPN client won't work. Their system sends you a one-time key via SMS as your password.

Once on their VPN, you start a remote desktop session to their internal "hopping server", which is a Windows server. After logging in with your Windows user credentials, you start a Windows Remote Desktop session *on that hopping server* to *another* Windows server, where you login with yet another set of Windows user credentials. For all these logins you have 30 seconds, otherwise back to step 1.
On that server you open a browser to access their JIRA, GitLab, etc or SSH into the actual dev machines - which AGAIN need yet another set of credentials.

So in total: VM -> VPN + RDP inside VM -> RDP #2 -> Browser/SSH/... -> Final system to work on
Input lag of one to multiple seconds. It was fucking unusable.

Now, the servers were very disconnect-happy to prevent anything "fishy" going on. Sitting at my desk at my company, connected to my company's wifi, was apparently fishy enough to kick me out every 5 to 20 minutes. And that meant starting from step 1 inside the VM again. So, never forget to plugin your network cable.

There's a special place in hell for this admin. And if there isn't, I'll PERSONALLY make the devil create one. Even now that I'm not even working on this any more.

Inception.
Today I needed to check something in a remote server: this was the easiest way:
1: teamviewer to my home pc from university
2: started a vm on that machine with vpn connection to my work office
3: rdp to a windows server vm
4: ssh to a vm on our hosting cluster
5: from there, ssh to the server that I needed access to

I got denied work from home status on black friday because I did not have RDP access for our solution.

let 👏 me 👏 use 👏 s 👏 s 👏 h 👏

You know you are a dev when you want to RDP into your own car...

Every time I see a client open ssh or rdp to the world when the servers sit behind a vpn, I die a little inside.

There was this time I had to help a friend of a friend. He was like "Hey, can you help me with some server stuff."

"Sure!"

(*Proceeds to give me a remote desktop connection to a windows server with a Ubuntu VM*)

.... Err.....

When I thought things couldn't get crazier that my vmware to win chrome mess.....

Doing an upgrade today when I have to VPN in from my mac to access a Web based secret server to get onto another VPN so I can RDP onto a Windows bastion host to then RDP to client windows servers within the RDP and from those hosts need to use putty to ssh into Linux servers to do the admin activities......

Now I'm obviously all for security but seriously VPN to RDP to RDP to ssh is just a bit mental......

But all of the SSL certs between each env is self signed anyhow......

Switching from Linux to Windows on my personal production server... because sometimes logging into RDP is so much easier than SSH.

Does anyone else here use PuTTY to SSH into a linux server and then create a tunnel into a Windows PC on that local network for remote desktop to pass through.

Fuck TeamViewer.

I've been using it to control my home PC desktop from remote for a few years now (booted PC via Wake-On-LAN, done stuff, shutdown). I started using Chrome Remote Desktop a while ago too, but its ports are blocked at work, so I had to rely on TV some more.

Recently TV more often told me that I was offline (but I wasn't) and more importantly they started blocking my connections due to "commercial usage" (it's my private shit, yo), so now I've moved on to RDP via SSH.

That really makes me feel relieved as I wanted to move away from it for a while now anyways and SSH tunnels also are the real shit.

Today was a good day.

Come on Visual Studio, add support for debugging applications over RDP... You support SSH ffs!

Can someone, anyone, explain to me, how can Microsoft get away with *charging extra* for additional concurrent RDP sessions on a self-hosted instance of Windows Server?

And not only that, but apparently also charges extra once the box gets over a certain amount of system users, too.

As a Linux admin that's used to working in teams over SSH, it just completely baffles me.

It would be terrible if such a practice was in free software... But a system, that one already *pays* for to run?

Or did I understand something wrong from a colleague that claims that this is the reason why I can't get an account on one of our Windows Servers?