Symbol madness



  • I thought I'd add the debugging symbols to Windows 2000 so I can see what's going on in Process Explorer when programs are up the creek. (It may also trigger Process Explorer to retrieve symbols from processes and libraries that do have symbols, such as GTK+/Win32 and gaim-debug.

    Lessee, I need debughlp.dll. Which ... hm ... for Update Rollup 1 for Windows 2000 SP4 is 22 MB. But to use that, I also need SP4's version, which is 72 MB. But to use that, I need the original debugging symbols from Windows 2000 SP0, whcih is 98 MB. That's a grand total of (compressed) 192 MB! Bloody hell ... Mac OS 9 comes with debugging symbols built in and the whole OS is smaller than that.

    Worse, the page notes: "Each x86 symbol package may require 750 megabytes (MB) or more of hard disk space". Uncompressed, it's many times the size of the OS on my Mac and, probably, larger than Windows 2000 itself.

    I can only hope that I am seriously missing the point somewhere and this isn't what I really want but, man ... still got 36 MB to go on that download



  • Who downloads entire symbol packs anymore?  Symbol servers are the new hotness.



  • @luke727 said:

    Who downloads entire symbol packs anymore?  Symbol servers are the new hotness.

    In other news, a new technology: code servers. Rather than having to store the entire application in memory, your computer fetches each machine code instruction over the internet, when the processor is ready to execute it. It's being promoted as a final solution to code bloat - you never download instructions that aren't being executed. 



  • And of course, that will be used to enforce DRM.



  • Aaagh, another WTF came to mind--Recursive code servers...a code server that requires server code from another code server.



  • OMG! Libraries dependencies finally solved! Just run it with DLL-over-internet.

    That said... java-web-start... 



  • Hahaha, you guys are too funny. The symbol package doesn't work -- seems Process Explorer needs a version of DbgHelp.DLL that supports Symbol Server (don't ask me, I'm a Mac guy ;) So before I went to bed, I grabbed the latest Debugging Tools package.

    Tried to launch the EXE from within Firefox and got this message:

    WTF ...

    Apparently this is Firefox's way of saying "the program is broken" (where Explorer says "...dbg_x86_6.7.05.0.exe is not a valid Win32 application.") Properties > Version and Digital Signature both work, but it just cannot actually be launched. No idea.



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    Apparently this is Firefox's way of saying "the program is broken" (where Explorer says "...dbg_x86_6.7.05.0.exe is not a valid Win32 application.") Properties > Version and Digital Signature both work, but it just cannot actually be launched. No idea.

    Actually, I believe that if you selected "launch application", then Firefox would give more or less the same error message (the error is from windows itself, not Firefox or IE). The only difference between the two is that Firefox's anti-crapware logic said "woah, WEIRD THING going on here that isn't supposed to happen. maybe somebody is being evil? better ask before we proceed, in case it's a trojan". IE doesn't have anything like that, so it just blindly ran the thing.



  • The Real WTF is that anyone, especially anyone here, would give Firefox any credit. No, I just confirmed. Open the Downloads window, and click Open against the relevant item. I get the "Open Executable File?" message, so I hit OK. Then I get the error displayed above. Launch Application and Cancel both do nothing. Launch Application does not generate an error. (There is also no indication that it loads rundll32.exe either)

    The previous version of Debugging Tools is fine. The latest version is a broken download. I'll tell Microsoft.



  • Of course, Microsoft are too enterprisey to have a straightforward contact mechanism. Or a "Webmaster" contact option. Or any straightforward contact option relating to development tools ...



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    Of course, Microsoft are too enterprisey to have a straightforward contact mechanism. Or a "Webmaster" contact option. Or any straightforward contact option relating to development tools ...

    I'd try here first.  It did take me a little bit to find since I had to find an option that wasn't tied to my MSDN subscription.

    http://support.microsoft.com/gp/contactbug 

     




  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    Of course, Microsoft are too enterprisey to have a straightforward contact mechanism. Or a "Webmaster" contact option. Or any straightforward contact option relating to development tools ...

    Are you worth $1m or more per year to them? No? They don't care what you have to say. If it was important, one of their corporate customers would have said it.

    (If you are worth that much, the telephone number for your contact with them is in your address book)



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    No, I just confirmed. Open the Downloads window, and click Open against the relevant item. I get the "Open Executable File?" message, so I hit OK. Then I get the error displayed above. Launch Application and Cancel both do nothing. Launch Application does not generate an error. (There is also no indication that it loads rundll32.exe either)

    Bizarre. I tried hacking up a corrupted binary and got the usual windows error message. You've either found a bug in firefox (fairly unlikely, as this particular code is the same for all file types - it just hands the thing off to windows and lets it figure out what to do with it, so either all files would work or none would), or a bug in windows, or your installation of windows is corrupted. I don't have a win2k installation on hand to test - if it's a windows bug, it's fixed in XP.



  • I'm confused. I don't know how to break a binary -- renaming a random file to *.exe causes NTVDM to run it. I don't know how to make an existing .exe come up a broken and not simply crash after loading. But anyway, Explorer itself gives me the correct message. It's when I launch the program from Firefox's download manager that I get the weird error message from Firefox itself. Firefox (2.0.0.3) seems to respond in a very odd way to the OS telling it that the program is hosed. I don't think my Windows install is broken at all.



  • @asuffield said:

    Bizarre. I tried hacking up a corrupted binary and got the usual windows error message. You've either found a bug in firefox (fairly unlikely, as this particular code is the same for all file types - it just hands the thing off to windows and lets it figure out what to do with it, so either all files would work or none would), or a bug in windows, or your installation of windows is corrupted.

    ...or the OS is responding with an error code (as the exe is corrupt), which Firefox is interpreting to mean that the OS doesn't know what to do with the file (due to an unknown extension) and so is asking the user what to do.



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    I don't know how to break a binary -- renaming a random file to *.exe causes NTVDM to run it. I don't know how to make an existing .exe come up a broken and not simply crash after loading.

    Valid PE header followed by garbage, and no sections with instructions on how to load a program (so it's passed to the PE dynamic loader, but that can make no progress). Perhaps I need a different form of corruption, but I'm finding it equally hard to imagine what *else* could cause this...



  • Madness?

     

    THIS

    IS

    WINDOWS! 



  • @asuffield said:

    Valid PE header followed by garbage, and no sections with instructions on how to load a program (so it's passed to the PE dynamic loader, but that can make no progress). Perhaps I need a different form of corruption, but I'm finding it equally hard to imagine what else could cause this...

    OK, I took a 200 k app, scribbled all over the part near the start where it says stuff like relo and data, and Windows no longer recognises it as a valid application. Uploaded it to the Web and downloaded it in Firefox -- same. Windows tells me it's not a valid Win32 program, but Firefox gives me the dialog box in the screenshot above. Firefox isn't understanding the error code from Windows.



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    @asuffield said:
    Valid PE header followed by garbage, and no sections with instructions on how to load a program (so it's passed to the PE dynamic loader, but that can make no progress). Perhaps I need a different form of corruption, but I'm finding it equally hard to imagine what else could cause this...

    OK, I took a 200 k app, scribbled all over the part near the start where it says stuff like relo and data, and Windows no longer recognises it as a valid application. Uploaded it to the Web and downloaded it in Firefox -- same. Windows tells me it's not a valid Win32 program, but Firefox gives me the dialog box in the screenshot above. Firefox isn't understanding the error code from Windows.

    Hmm, wonder why it works for me...  oh well, instructions on what to do next are here.



  • @luke727 said:

    Who downloads entire symbol packs anymore?  Symbol servers are the new hotness.

     
    They might be a nice idea, but I find that in practice, a three-to-five-minute delay every time I attach to a process in WinDbg is not exactly what I call "hot".  I usually block it at the firewall when it wants to query the servers...

     


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