Pierre (Entries tagged as iis)

how to generate backtraces on windows without compiler

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 08:02:00 +0200

How to get a back trace on windows without having to compile PHP has been an impossible task for many of us. The difficulty was to first succeed to compile php (given that you have a visual C++ installed). If you are in the middle of a bug hunting session, no need to say that setting up a windows build system is the last thing you like, especially if it is your first time. Thanks to Edin‘s window binary and MS Diagnostic Debug , it is now possible to have a backtrace in a couple of clicks.

What we will need to continue:

A PHP snapshot or stable release
PHP Debug pack (snapshot or stable thread safe or non thread safe
Microsoft Debug Diagnostic Tools
One evil script to crash PHP, the one in the bug 39346 is evil enough

For the sake of this example, we will simply use PHP in the shell. The same method can be used for IIS or any other process or services.

Once you have installed the Debug diagnostic tools and uncompressed PHP and its debug pack (they can be kept in two separate folders), the first step is to configure the diagnostic tools. Select the tools menu and click on "Options and settings". The first tab contains the path to the symbols files, add the "debug folder" to the existing list using the "browse" button:

Now we are ready to generate our backtrace.

We will use the wizard, click the "Add a rule" button and choose "Crash" as the rule type:

In the next window, select "a specific process":

Add a "sleep(10);" for the first run (from the cmd: "php.exe crashme.php"), it will let you enough time to click "next" and select the php process:

Click again next and let it crash. If everything went well, you should see your new rule as shown in the image below:

It also detected that "php.exe" was used. A rule has been created for all instance of "php.exe". It will save you the sleep and process selection.

Now you can click the "Analyze data" button:

Et voila, the complete report will show up in your internet explorer (compressed html):

As PHP internals developer, what we need is the backtrace itself, you can find it under "Thread X – System ID XXX".

The DDT can be used to hunt leaks and memory handles, but it will quickly reach its limit. A real debugger and compiler will be required to actually fix the issues. But it is a real progress, I hope it will help you to help us to improve PHP on windows!

Initial PHP4 support for htscanner

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 13:18:00 +0100

The first releases of the new 0.8.x have published earlier this week (0.8.1 is the latest). The main change is the full support of PHP4. I will support it as long as PHP.net maintains it. The ability to keep htscanner loaded while using PHP CLI is now possible without having to tweak the configuration (useful if you use a single php.ini for both cli and cgi).

I like to thank to widexs.nl, they make PHP4 support possible by sponsoring it.

Howto use a single php.ini for cli or cgi with htscanner, use 0.7.0 or later :)

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 11:46:00 +0100

Htscanner reports error during module or request init (returns FAILURE), these errors may be fatal and stop the current executions. This behavior is not desired if you use it in a shell ((if you have only one system php.ini for both cli and cgi or if htscanner is compiled statically). This release brings a new ini settings to solve this problem, stop_on_error.

When set to 1 htscanner returns a failure when an error occured internally (cache, doc_root missing, etc.). If it is et to 0 (the default) it will simply return SUCCESS and do nothing. It is useful if you have only one php.ini for cli and cgi or if you compiled it staticaly.

htscanner, new release, ISP needs?

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 16:59:00 +0100

The 0.6.3 releases have two important fixes:

Possible erroneous ini value length have been fixed
The fatal errors have in module and request initialization have been replaced by warnings

Thanks to Eugeny Zadevalov for the detailed reports. Eugeny sent patches to use htscanner in apache when mod_htaccess is active but without mod_php. You can find it in the README file in the release archive or CVS. We will try to keep this patch up to date.

He is working on making htscanner compatible with PHP4. I’m not a fan of supporting dead branches (I consider PHP4 as dead) but if enough users need a PHP4 version, I can push the patches upstream. In the worst case, I will add them in the release and Eugeny can maintain them. Let me know what you need!

During the season holidays, I got a couple of mails from hosting company using fastcgi and planning to use htscanner. Having system configuration automatically set by htscanner (open basedir per vhost for ex.) but not editable by the users can help to use fastcgi for shared hosts. Are you an ISP? or simply provide hosting services and plan to give htscanner support to your users? Let me know what you need.

Htscanner 0.6.2 has been released

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 02:51:00 +0100

Yet another PECL release, htscanner 0.6.2 is out. This release fixes a annoying but minor bug in the shutdown function. A new error message has been added when no translated path has been found.

I’m wondering if a function to manually clear the cache for a given document root (like you can clear the cache for your document root only) can be useful. Let me know if you need it, I can add it before I freeze this extension until the first stable release.

htscanner 0.6.1

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 11:08:00 +0100

0.6.1 has just been released. It is a bug fixes release only. One leak and some string optimizations. See the full changelong here.

cache added to htscanner

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 02:40:00 +0100

htscanner 0.6.0 has been released. It caches the ini settings instead of looking for htaccess files in the current directory and its parents. The performance impact is yet minimal.

A new ini setting defines the cache lifetime in seconds: htscanner.default_ttl, the default lifetime is 5mins.

Next step, bring this extension to a stable state before adding any new features.

htscanner homepage

htscanner, windows binaries available

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 13:39:00 +0100

A quick note about the htscanner windows binaries, they are now available on pecl4win. I will also try to run more tests on windows, especiallly IIS + fcgi.

htscanner, htaccess-like for FastCGI or non apache SAPI

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 05:01:00 +0100

htscanner is an extension to emulate htaccess with non apache SAPI like FastCGI. It was originally developed by Bart Vanbrabant (Thanks to Runa@lighttpd on freenode for the head up, I did not know this extension until yesterday). It has the same advantages and disadvantages than Apache’s htaccess, use it with cautions

Many lighttpd users asked for such feature for PHP. After a quick test, I find it useful too and good enough to give it some love. As Bart does not maintain it anymore, I’m taking the hand on it and will continue the developments via PECL.

This release (0.5.0) contains a couple of additions and fixes, the most important are:

safe mode and open_basedir checks
usage of PHP streams API instead of the std IO
fix a couple of bugs in threaded environments (like cwd detection)

It is still alpha, I did not run heavy tests now, comments and feedbacks welcome.

Windows fixes release for Zip, fopen(,"rb") may not be binary safe

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 02:45:00 +0100

This release is mostly for windows users using other SAPI than CLI or (F)CGI. The bug is fixed in CVS already but I was lacking the time to release it. Pecl4win providing snapshots, it is half of a problem

The issue is actually a windows bug. No matter if I give or not the "b" flag to fopen, the write operations are not binary safe. It seems to be a known issue as many projects use the same trick:

 _setmode(_fileno(tfp), _O_BINARY );

PHP is forcing the binary mode in SAPI and CLI, that’s why the problem was not that easy to reproduce (apache or IIS debuggin on windows was not really my cup of tea .

I was trying to find some reference or bug reports about this issue but without much success, so far only people complaining about windows broken fopen. If anyone has detailed informations about this issue, please let me know.

As always you can fetch the DLLs from pecl4win or PECL.

Full changelog
Download