Getting Around Blocked Ports

Regularly, I find myself in a location that blocks ports to the outside world. In many of those moments, I can’t use Remote Desktop (RDP) sessions to connect to Virtual Machines hosted on Azure. The strategy expressed in this post is one of many possible solutions that also applies to Linux and SSH sessions.

The Strategy

• Using a Load Balancer and NAT rules to map port 443 to the RDP (3389) port for a Jumpbox Virtual Machine (VM)
• Using the Jumpbox to RDP into VMs deployed to the Azure Virtual Network.
  

Share this:

My previous post was about using the Azure Resource Manager to provision a Virtual Machine. It demonstrated how to use a custom PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) to stripe, format and assign a drive letter to a storage space that contains thirty-two 1TB VHDs.

Debugging a custom PowerShell Desired State Configuration was a challenge, because I was completely new to PowerShell DSC and to the Azure Virtual Machine DSC Extension. This post is all about how I managed to debug, refine and test using the artifacts created by the Virtual Machine Extension.