Some time ago, I needed to enter in a Win server via RDP. It was a pain but fortunately a good friend of mine at that time helped me out with the “Domain” section when trying to establish a connection. TL;DR It worked, and in a really simple and straight to the point fashion.
Trouble is, my memory now betrayed me, and this is the small tale I have to tell you about it.
I needed (again) to connect to a Win machine via RDP (no work involved this time), and I had a bare figment of a memory that it was something along the lines of \. - Still, I wasn’t really sure, and so I asked GPT, if it knew something about it. It didn’t. So I reverted back to Google asking the best I could muster and remember what was the simplest way to connect to “This PC” using a domain within RDP for windows. Still, no anwswers.
I stalled. I was doubting myself. I had a vague memory that it was somewhere along the lines of that \. but I wasn’t really sure if it was really that. I wasn’t sure because mostly I couldn’t understand what it this. And this is the real important part.
You see, I had memorized correctly, it seems. Later after some frustration I tried to connect with the \. in the Domain section, after several minutes of frustration trying to research for the answer online but nowhere to be found. I was doubtful, but I tried, and guess what? It worked. Flawlessly
The answer was all along ‘\.’ and I had it at the start. But I wasn’t sure. I thought it was wrong. It was the correct option all along, but I wasn’t aware of that. I wasn’t aware because I had only remembered I had not commited it truly understanding it since the first time. It had worked before, I guess I could remember in the future and use if needed and promptly forgot about it.
Issue is, I did remember in the future, but I didn’t know anymore if it was really for the purpose that I was seeking, and worse yet I did not know its true meaning behind \. in the first place.
What the \. truly meant:
for DOMAIN: . and for Username: user
it translated as:
.\user
Which meant in reality:
“Authenticate this user agains the local account database on the target machine.”
Not Active Directory Not a remote domain Not a Kerberos realm
The dot just meant “the local computer” in question.
That would be equivalent of:
computername\user
I had the correct answer to connect to the standalone server all along.
The problem was: I didn’t have the proper understanding.
I could and indeed managed to remember the “aesthetic” part of the comand.
But by not truly knowing or being sure of its function inside of that context, even though I remembered it correctly, I couldn’t convince myself that it was in truth the answer for what I was seeking out in the first place.
Sometimes we have the right answers, but we doubt that they are the correct ones for us and the cases we need to solve. Not because they are wrong, but because we didn’t know (how) they were correct in the first place.
That is, until the moment that I tried to check and ran the \. on the domain name and could log in successfully as I expected in the first place. I still wasn’t sure, but I took a step of faith, and in this case my faith in my memory (which always betrays be) was correct.
So, then, maybe, we just need do some more experiments in controlled environments, check things up, make annotations, and most of all, understand why something is the way it is, before just commiting to memory.
I know it is trouble, it takes time and effort, but maybe, in the overall scheme of things, that might save us big time.
This, ladies and gentleman, was the tales of a \. crossing my mind and not entirely commiting to memory. Well, that was it then, now I believe it is way more solidified.
Thanks for tuning in.
Peace.