How to debug a System Service on customer machine

[Mike Treadway]

This may seem like a stupid question, but for some reason I'm having trouble
finding an answer.

I have a service that is running with a system account on a Windows 2000
machine at a customer site written in .NET. The service periodically crashes
with an Unhandled exception. How can I attach a debugger to give me more
information about why the exception is thrown?

I've used Dr. Watson and it doesn't detect anything with the service
crashes. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

[mdb]

"=?Utf-8?B?TWlrZSBUcmVhZHdheQ==?="
<Mi**********@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in
news:EE**********************************@microsof t.com:

I have a service that is running with a system account on a Windows
2000 machine at a customer site written in .NET. The service
periodically crashes with an Unhandled exception. How can I attach a
debugger to give me more information about why the exception is
thrown?

If it is a debug version of the assembly, then you can install the "Remote
Debugging Tools" on the machine, and attach to the process while it is
running with Visual Studio. There are some issues in doing this - I think
you need to be a member of the same domain because the debugger user
identity needs to be a member of Debugger Users or something like that on
the target machine, but you might be able to work around it (haven't tried
myself.)

-mdb

[Mike Treadway]

Thanks for your response. That would be great if I could do that, but I would
need to forward some ports on the customer's firewall. Also, the machine is
on a domain and it would be too difficult to try and work around that.

Isn't there a way I can have Windows or the CLR create a dump file?

"mdb" wrote:

"=?Utf-8?B?TWlrZSBUcmVhZHdheQ==?="
<Mi**********@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in
news:EE**********************************@microsof t.com:

I have a service that is running with a system account on a Windows
2000 machine at a customer site written in .NET. The service
periodically crashes with an Unhandled exception. How can I attach a
debugger to give me more information about why the exception is
thrown?

If it is a debug version of the assembly, then you can install the "Remote
Debugging Tools" on the machine, and attach to the process while it is
running with Visual Studio. There are some issues in doing this - I think
you need to be a member of the same domain because the debugger user
identity needs to be a member of Debugger Users or something like that on
the target machine, but you might be able to work around it (haven't tried
myself.)

-mdb