Remote Desktop is your friend

Lets say you have a scenario where you are on a VPC (Virtual Machine) and are logged in as an Administrator. You now configure something on that machine that needs to be tested as a more limited user.

To meet your testing requirements you decided to create a special local account on the VM which is restricted enough to simulate correctly for your scenario, So now what? how do you start testing?

One option is to log-off the VM and log back in as the new restricted user account.  But what if you log-in and find that you need to make more changes as Admin to get your scenario to work, what now? Its simple, you will be in logon/logoff hell.

Remote Desktop

Yesterday I learned a trick to make life much easier in just such scenario: Use Remote Desktop.

Since Windows will allow one Remote and one Console user to be logged in at the same time this works great. In my scenario above id simply stay logged in as Admin to the console of my VM using Virtual PC 2007 interface and then RDP into the box as the more limited user to test anything I needed.

(Thanks Brian for this tip!)

One additional note: If you cannot connect to your VM from the host machine don't forget you can even Remote Desktop into the Virtual Machine from inside the Virtual Machine itself. Just remember, turn of "Connect to console" since you will already have one such connection and it will fail.

With every such new trick learned we become empowered to work faster and better.