[bionsystem]

We work exclusively on remote VMs that have no internet access. Well writing the stuff is fine through PuTTY (with tmux+vim), some other guys use RDP with VSCode but it is extremely laggy and I hate it. Some tasks can be annoying.

$job before that I would remotely connect to clients machines through various ways. Most would be a webpage with some terminal emulation in JS, or some web-based RDP (to a Linux or a Windows machines), and sometimes bouncing again to our last machines. And sometimes you get the actual VPN where all you have to do is to run the client (typically IPDiva, sometimes they use OpenVPN) and just run putty to connect to your machine.

That last experience was often painful especially when certain softwares in between you and your work start to fail. Also a lot of those clients had none or very restricted internet access, so it is really hard to get debugging tools. Sometimes your work would just be a loop of "connect, type a few commands, get the web-based terminal messed up, disconnect, repeat" until your problem is solved. Especially, for our needs we set up our own windows VMs with all software needed to connect to all the clients, hosted in our office and accessible via our own VPN. This way our clients would only see our office IP. But that meant one more VPN for everybody and one more "bounce" to do before any work...

[wordofx]

> We work exclusively on remote VMs that have no internet access.

Is this some kind of developer dominatrix fetish or something where people get off punishing themselves.

“You’ve been a bad boy! You used AI! No Internet for you”

[bionsystem]

We can use any AI we want but only on our work laptop. The work laptop cannot install any useful dev tool so we connect to the remote machine for any code write/build/execution, and if needed copy/paste anything we find online or from an llm.

So work laptop has internet, dev machine doesn't. Dev machine has access to some nexus repository (some are proxies to the internet like pip, maven-central, nodejs, some rpm like EPEL, etc) and can actually run code (laptop doesn't, lots of windows "security" stuff activated that require signing the code for every edit).

I think they call it "security" or something like that. They pay reasonnably well and working hours window is reasonnably small so at this point I don't care anymore. At least I avoid the cloud "cool kids" crowd where everything has to be the absolutely latest tech and nobody really knows why everything is re-written every 6 months.