Posted by Erland Sommarskog on 01/27/06 00:32

serge (sergea@nospam.ehmail.com) writes:
> Sometimes I do debug remotely (maybe often). Are you saying it is not
> always a safe approach to debug remotely? "There is so much red tape":
> these are known issues that happen frequently or in the very rare cases?
> Would you know if there are MS KB on these problems or personal
> experiences led you to stop debugging remotely?

Unsafe? Yes, a little, although that was not really what I meant with
red tape. What I mean is simply that there are so many things have to
be aligned for it to work, that I don't find it worth the hassle.

Some time back, we found that debugging did not work when you had Windows
XP SP2 installed. I did some investigation, and found that hotfix
8.00.944 addressed this problem. (This hotfix is included in SP4.) I
installed hotfix on client and server. I also had to open port 135 in
Windows firewall. Now, port 135 is not any port: this is RPC, and a
prime attack surfaces for viruses. So opening port 135 is a little unsafe,
so there is all reason to only open it for the SQL Servers you want to
debug. (If is possible to open a port only for a certain IP address in
Windows firewall.) Eventually I got it working.

Then some months later, I felt like debugging again, but now I was out
of luck again. I did some inquires, and apparently our Windows admin had
decided to cut the number of permissions for the SQL Server service
account. I don't know exactly what permissions that are required, but
as it writes back to the client, it needs more than plain-user rights.

At this point, I just gave it up. These are not the only thing that
can stop debugging from working. And after all, what you can dig out
from the debugger can easily be achieved in other ways. Of course,
code that uses iterative approaches can be painful to debug that
way. But good SQL should not have much such code anyway. :-)

And, oh, there is one more possible issue with the debugger. Single-
stepping through a transaction is not that friendly if other users
needs to access the data.


--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel@sommarskog.se

Books Online for SQL Server 2005 at
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/downloads/books.mspx
Books Online for SQL Server 2000 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/previousversions/books.mspx

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