Shortly after celebrating 5 years at Citrix I got my first certificate since the 1st of December, 2006 when I was certified in Kernel Debugging for Windows®. Now it is also my first Citrix certificate and it marks my 5 year service:
- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -
This one is called No Question and is summarized by the following dialog that I observed many times:
As an engineer proceeds with analysis of a problem a phone rings and an irritated customer (internal or external) asks “What is the answer?”, an engineer glancing over the problem description replies, “What is the question?”.
This immediately came to my mind when I found this famous dialog:
“As the poet Gertrude Stein lay on her deathbed, her partner, Alice B. Toklas, leaned over and whispered, ‘What is the answer, Gertrude?’. Replied Stein, ‘What’s the question?’”
- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -
Before the advent of virtual machines to Wintel platforms people had to take pictures of bluescreens or even write all data down by hand to fax it:
How easy it is today! You just do Print Screen.
- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -
I’ve just passed 5 year mark in my Citrix career and I say those years were really exciting! Incidentally at the same time, on 14th of October 2003 I started doing true memory dump analysis in WinDbg-sense of it despite the fact that I’d been doing debugging since 1987 and encountered the first symbolic assembly language debugger on PDP-11 RSX-11M Russian clone in 1988. Also 5 years ago I made my transition from software engineering world to software technical support and started my journey to become a manager.
I’ve put a timeline on a portal accessible from the main page or from the following link:
http://www.dumpanalysis.org/Timeline
The timeline will help me in the future to write my memoirs (Crash Dump: A Software Engineering Autobiography, ISBN: 978-1906717193).
Finally, to record the glorious Citrixofication of the world by various Citrixware, Opentask decided to publish a book where I plan to be an editor of various contributors and probably write a chapter or two myself:
Discovering Citrixware (ISBN: 978-1906717278)
It is not about troubleshooting but more in a sense of discovery. More details will be announced later.
- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -
“… those who have a natural talent for” troubleshooting “are generally quick at every other kind of knowledge …” debugging “is a kind of knowledge in which the best natures should be trained, and which must not be given up.”
- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -
Seems railroad to it was a success: just got this message in my e-mail:
“Congratulations on passing your recent Microsoft Certification exam, inspiring confidence for your employer, your peers, and yourself with a widely-recognized validation of your skills on Microsoft technology.“
Because I haven’t done any exam since Windows Internals beta I assumed that I passed it and I was right! After registering at Microsoft certification site as MCP I was able to build my logo:
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Here is the link to Exam 70-660 information and required skills:
http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/Exams/70-660.aspx
- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -
The most downloaded is StressPrinters:
http://support.citrix.com/product/xa/v4.5/tool/?sortBy=READCOUNT
The best rated tools are:
http://support.citrix.com/product/xa/v4.5/tool/?sortBy=RATING
- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -
“Good” troubleshooters “see analogies between” applications “or” services, “the very best ones see analogies between analogies.”
- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -
“If the” modules “in my” process “don’t work with or without” yours, “I cannot blame” you.
Francisco Alves, “If the brakes in my car don’t work with or without petrol in the fuel tank, I cannot blame the fuel”
- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -
“I’m gonna do better than learn to” troubleshoot, “I’m gonna learn to” debug.
- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -
Over the time I noticed that some troubleshooting and debugging tools show numbers in hex and some in decimal even for things that are traditionally hex, for example PID and TID. Then when getting data from one program I need to convert it to a different base for another tool. So over some time I was able to get the idea of what hex numbers usually are even if they don’t have hexadecimal ‘A’-'F’ in their digits. For example, in one log I got this output:
Parent changed to 393954
Although this number is valid hex number as well as decimal I had intuitive feeling that it was decimal… Checking source code of the tool revealed that it was output as decimal indeed.
I guess this feeling arouse because I just checked that most window handles that I have seen have the 4th zero digit:
Handle: 2801E6Handle: 110044Handle: 10052Handle: E01B6Handle: 602E2- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -
Crash dumps “have another hypnotic effect. Because they are not immediately understood, they, like certain jokes, are suspected of holding in some sort of magic embrace the secret of” troubleshooting, “or at least some of its more” difficult “parts.”
Scott Milross Buchanan, Poetry and Mathematics
- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -
“Everything is memory dump.”
I’m very excited to announce that Volume 2 is available in paperback, hardcover and digital editions:
Memory Dump Analysis Anthology, Volume 2
In one or two weeks paperback edition should also appear on Amazon and other bookstores. Amazon hardcover edition is planned to be available by the end of October.
I’m often asked when Volume 3 is available and I currently plan to release it in October - November, 2009. In the mean time I’m planning to concentrate on other publishing projects.
- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -
Out of 85,800 Google hits for “In the beginning there was the” X I couldn’t find X == crash so I presume this quotation is traced to me 
“In the beginning there was the crash.”
- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -
The book is nearly finished and here is the final TOC:
Memory Dump Analysis Anthology, Volume 2: Table of Contents
- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -
Today Citrix officially joined the club of public symbol server companies! Please refer to the following article for details:
How to Use the Citrix Symbol Server to Obtain Debug Symbols
- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -
Here you can find the draft TOC for the forthcoming book “DebugWare: The Art and Craft of Writing Troubleshooting and Debugging Tools”:
- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -
Here is the draft front cover for the forthcoming Windows Debugging Notebook:
It is based on Debugging Book Stack concept.
- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -
“Crash dumps are fossils”
Here is the draft TOC for the previously announced book Crash Dump Analysis for System Administrators and Support Engineers (Windows Edition) which I’m co-authoring with Thomas Monahan, a Lead Escalation Engineer at Citrix Systems:
- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -
Another pattern that logically flows from Tool Chain is called Tool Box. Their principal difference is that the former launches subordinated tools in a sequence to reach the common goal and the latter is the tool that launches other tools in any sequence independently:
Often tool boxes are implemented as toolbars. Another boundary example is the so called resource kit tools where an HTML page or taskbar menu serves the role of tool box.
- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -