Question

I work at a small computer shop, and we have to analyze windows minidumps all the time. My idea was to install the Windows Debugging Tools on a windows PC and use apache/PHP as an interface to it. That way I could just set up an HTML upload form that would accept the minidump file, run it through KD, then spit out the output.

It nearly works. I created a special user just for apache so I could assign it write privaleges to C:\symbols, and I use the following code:

<?php
$kdScript  = "\"\\Program Files\\Debugging Tools for Windows (x86)\\kd.exe\" -c \"!analyze -v;Q\" -y srv*c:\symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols -z ";
$kdScript .= $_FILES["myFile"]["tmp_name"];
$output = `$kdScript`;

print("<pre>$output</pre>");
?>

The problem I’m having is that the symbols are not downloaded as they should be. I’ve verified apache is running as the user I think it is by calling “whoami” from inside backticks. I’ve verified that I can run the windows version of wget from within backticks, so I have access to the network. I can file_put_contents() into a new file under C:\symbols, so I have file creation permissions.

Also, I tried having PHP simply output the command to the browser so I could copy and paste it into a terminal. I was able to run a command prompt as my apache user via “runas”, paste the command from PHP’s output into the prompt, and it worked as expected, downloading all the symbols it needed to C:\symbols. Of course, I had to point it to a dump file NOT in the PHP temp directory, but this shouldn’t make a difference.

What could be the problem? Just as a side note, all of this is local on a trusted pc in a company that has a total of 3 employees/owners. Security for this project is irrelavent.

Answer 1

Not sure what your exact problem is, but the symbol server client code is finicky and not very debuggable, it took us lots of tinkering to implement our version of this. You can always direct folks there or use it yourself:

http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=analyze

-scott