A difficult debugging scenario

A customer had a problem with printing. I don’t know all the details about the setup. Trevor had a repro scenario in his office in North Carolina, and I used Remote Desktop to access it. It was composed of 3 virtual machines. One was a Citrix domain controller, another was a workstation, and the third was a “remote desktop” like ISA connection to the workstation. Apparently the ISA machine used the printers of the workstation.

To make things more complicated, each of the machines was running a different OS: Win2000, Win2003 and Win XP. Complicated enough? no: some were German.

Could it be worse? The entire setup had to be off the corporate network (because the domain controller had to be isolated), so copying any files to the machines was laborious and cumbersome. Ugh!

So I was in Seattle debugging on a German virtual machine connected to another virtual machine inside an isolated virtual network inside Trevor’s physical machine connected via Remote Desktop in North Carolina!

Thanks Trevor!