Visual studio remote debugging error

Question

I have run into a most frustrating error. I have set up remote debugging before on several virtual machines that reside on a different domain, but for some reason this particular one refuses to work 90% of the time.

I am setting up cross-domain remote debugging. I have my development machine, and I have a virtual machine set up on another domain. I will simply call them domain Alpha (my development machine) and domain Beta (the virtual machine domain). I am logged on to my development machine with my user name on the Alpha domain. I am logged in as the administrator of the Beta domain on the virtual machine.

Alpha\myuser

Beta\Administrator

I have created a local user account on the virtual machine, with the same name and password as myuser. myuser is an administrator on the virtual machine. I have also added Alpha\myuser as an administrator on the virtual machine. I have launched visual studio 2010 x86 remote debugging tool as user Beta\RemoteDebug, who is also a local administrator on the virtual machine. I have a local user account on my development machine with the same name and password as RemoteDebug.

Development Machine

• Alpha\myuser (local admin)
• Devmachine\RemoteDebug (local admin)

Virtual Machine

• Beta\RemoteDebug (local admin)
• Virtualmachine\myuser (local admin)
• Alpha\myuser (local admin)

Now, when I try to connect to my virtual machine in Visual Studio 2010, I get a Logon failure error: unkown user name or bad password. I have disabled firewalls and verified that I can ping both machines just fine. Just earlier this afternoon, I went into Manage User Accounts on my virtual machine and reset the password on the virtualmachine\myuser account and typed in my password just as a sanity check to make sure I had typed it in properly. I was then immediately able to remotely debug from my development machine. After I finished with the particular test I was running, I tried to reconnect and the same logon failure popped up. My program was not making any system changes, I had not reboot or logged off, and I have debugged it normally on similar virtual machines across 2 domains.

Has anyone run into a similar problem with remote debugging? I cannot narrow down what could be causing this to happen. So far, I was able to connect to this machine on two separate occasions, however after both occasions I was met with a logon failure after I had made no changes to any users or their passwords.

Answer 1

I just solved the issue. For those of you who happen to come across the same issue I had, I was able to resolve it by changing my computer name on my virtual machine. I had picked a name that was just over 15 characters, so it was shortened down to 15. I did not think this would be the issue that was causing it, but with how our network is set up this was the culprit.