If you have an additional machine sitting around that you can spare, you can connect to WinDbg remotely. It is actually quite easy, although the documentation does its very, very best to obscure this fact by creating about fifty different variations on the word “Client” and “Sever.” Basically, you can either just connect the spare machine as you normally would and then use the “.server” metacommand, or run kdsrv on it. On the host side, you just connect differently. Unfortunately, if you are trying to do this remotely, IT is almost certainly going to stomp on this, but whatever firewall issues you may experience have nothing to do with WinDbg. I’ve used this a couple of times, and its not 100% reliable, but it works pretty well.
SOFTICE:
I also would not recommend SoftICE, as it is no more, and even if it were still around and kicking, there are only a couple of good reasons, in my opinion, to pay those absolute pirates at Compuware who got exactly what they deserved, only it should have come sooner. In practice, probably what you would really want here is Visual SoftICE, which comes with SoftICE. Visual SoftICE, while a lot more attractive the WinDbg, most definitely has been known to have issues with losing connections, but it is still works well enough to use productively if you have remote connectivity needs. It certainly did have its problems, and the crap that was packaged with was insulting (curiously, as kernel dev, I never found use for the really kick ass VisualBasic code optimization tool that was itself written in VB) to the point that it bordered on being abusive. That being said, I used it for long time, and still do from time to time, and its not nice to pick on a dead man. What gets left out of this conversation is that WinDbg was no prize for a long time, and, in my opinion, was insufferable until FireWire came along. The dev here is actually hitting on one of the two reasons it might still be used: if you have a hard requirement for remote connectivity. I used the ethernet transport for years, and I never really had much of a problem with it. To be sure I had some, but they were all addressable, and much more so than getting WinDbg to connect from 100 miles away. Although they supported only three families of ethernet chipsets (3c90x, 825XX and RTL8139), in something like seven years, I ran across a single machine that did not contain embedded support for one of these. In my experience, a machine having support for one of these is at least an order of magnitude more lilkely then a machine having a 1394 card, and, the connectivity issues are more less common than ones involving screwy 1394 chipsets. Whatever the case, it can be solved for probably less than $20 at any store that sells anything related to computers, and you don’t have to know things about the chipsets that aren’t listed on the package, unlike 1394. If all of this fails, you can use UNDI support, which is what I did, and it does kind of suck, and you can’t use it early in the boot process. But none of these problems are as anywhere near as common, as difficult to immediately remedy or as expensive as the 1394 case with WinDbg. What was a real problem was, back in the day, before the added universal video support via DirectX (I’m told that part of the deal with aquiring the rights for this was that the had to purchase the all the other garbage that they ended up packaging with SI; I have no idea of whether that is true or not, but it seems kind of unlikely - splitting your time between a pretty cutting edge idea and suites of visual basic tools) was being limited to a small set of graphics cards. That really sucked, and even the UVD was not without its issues, but all of this was for a while cheaper than a second machine and whatever software licenses you needed.
All that being said, now that WinDbg has a reasonable transport, it is a much, much better setup, even leaving cost out of it, unless you have remote connectivity needs , or are doing some specific types of reverse engineering (for which WinDbg is a complete waste of time), because it is more stable, and mostly because you can do so much more and more easily with the extensions. It is true that these can be used with Visual SoftICE (that claim is made for SoftICE, which was not my experience, but I didn’t use it remotely much), but Visual SoftICE’s connectivity is fairly suspect. I was very leary about going to WinDbg, and, retrospectively, I wish I had a little earlier, but most definitely not much earlier. Not having to go to a client’s site immediately or sooner every time there was a problem was really, really wonderful. Ultimately, I of course ended up there anyway, but being able to do it in a somewhat controlled and more convenient manner was great, and they (other than IT) liked the idea that I was able to connect remotely (where possible) when they needed, even if, in truth, it really was sort of a cosmetic.
Its not nice to pick on the dead. Just kidding. It, like, say, Apple, basically committed suicide by abusive marketing practices.
mm
>> xxxxx@acm.org 2007-01-16 19:53 >>>
Some of us never got SoftIce to not mess up the way the system was supposed
to work, so I for one would highly recomend against it. I applauded it
demise or as Mark Twain said ‘‘I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a
nice letter saying I approved of it.’’
–
Don Burn (MVP, Windows DDK)
Windows 2k/XP/2k3 Filesystem and Driver Consulting
http://www.windrvr.com
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“Michael Kohne” wrote in message news:xxxxx@ntdev…
As you’ve heard from others, you can’t do exactly that.
I personally recommend the firewire. Firewire interfaces are generally
available for just about anything (I believe OSR sells some cards
known to work), and it’s one heck of a lot faster than serial.
The only other thing I can think of is to possibly find a copy of
SoftIce. In it’s last incarnation (it’s a discontinued product now!),
it could supposedly debug over ethernet, but only certain 10 base T
cards. Please note that I never got this functionality to work at all,
in spite of having the boss shell out the $20 for the ‘correct’
ethernet card. I do NOT recomment this solution at all.
Really, just get firewire cards. It’s your best bet.
On 1/16/07, Lucas Bracher wrote:
> Hi there!
> In order to debug my driver, I would like to use windbg and a serial
> cable
> connecting two machines, but one of them doesn?t have free serial ports.
> I
> guess I can create a pipe between a virtual serial port and a tcp port in
> both machines in order to achieve this (i.e, virtual com <-> ethernet <->
> virtual com), but I don?t know how. Does anybody here use this technique
> to
> connect two machines? What program/service I need to use? Is there
> another
> way to do this?
>
> Thank you so much!
>
> Lucas.
>
>
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