Setting up a public (or private) symbol server over http

Andy Finkenstadt picture Andy Finkenstadt · Mar 11, 2011 · Viewed 14.4k times · Source

Every piece of documentation I've found (references 1 through 5) talks about setting up a symbol server by using a shared UNC path, and then putting the correct settings available to the local debugger instance (whether _NT_SYMBOL_PATH or the Visual Studio IDE Debugging settings).

Microsoft provides a symbol server (reference 6) available via http for their public symbol stores.

I want to create, for my own code, a symbol server accessible over http transport, instead of over UNC file sharing. The Mozilla folks appear to have done so (reference 7), but it is no longer functional.

Are there better references available for performing this task than I have found so far?


References

  1. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/b8ttk8zy(v=vs.80).aspx
  2. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms680693(v=vs.85).aspx
  3. http://stackhash.com/blog/post/Setting-up-a-Symbol-Server.aspx
  4. http://entland.homelinux.com/blog/2006/07/06/
  5. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/gg462988
  6. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/311503
  7. http://developer.mozilla.org/en/Using_the_Mozilla_symbol_server

Answer

Andy Finkenstadt picture Andy Finkenstadt · Mar 30, 2011

I believe the answer is a very simple, "Just share the directory via some sort of http path." According to Chad Austin's entry on "Creating Your Very Own Symbol Server", this will just work.

In other words, the directory which symstore.exe uses to store the symbols, when served up as http://symbols.example.com/public_symbols/ , will be usable as the symbol server target for the Windows Debugging Tools.