Grabbing the dumps from the customer's machine

Occasionally I encounter the task of assisting the customer to get the bump of the crashed process. My company develops software for marine navigation systems, and as you can guess there some problems with internet connection in open sea. In fact, most of the vessels have internet access aboard, but it’s very slow due to the high price of satellite connections. In addition, in most vessels you can’t take direct connection to bridge environment due to security and technical restrictions. So, the only communication remains is e-mail ?

To save my time and customers peace of mind I wrote the trivial batch script, which reduce the amount of explanations to minimum:

@echo off rem The processes of interest set PROCESSES=(IBSSvc TBService scserver71) rem List all processes in the system tlist /v > dumps/processes.txt rem Grab all dumps and debugger output for the processes of interest for %%i in %PROCESSES% do cdb -pv -pn "%%i.exe" -logo dumps/%%i.txt -c ".dump /ma dumps/%%i.dmp;q"

All tools you need for script execution you can find in “Debugging Tools for Windows” suite.

Here is the list of modules:

* cdb.exe * dbgeng.dll * dbghelp.dll             * ext.dll * tlist.exe * uext.dll

After that, I just pack all those stuff to self-extracting archive and send it to customer. After customer unpacks the archive and executes the script, he sends me content of the “dumps” folder back and I have the opportunity to analyze it.

You can modify the script the way you like and use it where appropriate.