One of the most powerful features of the DTW debuggers (including WinDbg) is the ability to do debugging remotely. Besides the obvious capability to debug someone else’s computer from your computer, the remote debugging support built in to the DTW debuggers turns out to be useful for much more.
For instance, you can use some of the remote debugging options to show someone else what you are working on with the debugger if you get stuck, or you can use it to debug programs that you would otherwise be unavailable to in Terminal Server under Windows 2000.
The range of remote debugging options available to spans from “dumb terminal” type solutions where text input/output is simply redirected over the network to having the local debugger do the real work using an RPC-like protocol over the network. Remote debugging is available for both user mode and kernel mode debugging.
Over the next couple days I’m going to do a quick run through of each of the major remote debugging facilities included with the DTW debuggers, what their major benefits are, and how to pick which remote debugging option for a debugging session (as the various methods are useful under different conditions). Although there is some (rather sparse) documentation in the WinDbg help file covering some of the remote debugging topics, there are some limitations (and usage considerations) that the help file does not articulate which are very important for deciding what you are going to do. I’ll try to address these in this post series.
[…] Overview of WinDbg remote debugging […]