On Regtrace and how to disable it correctly

re: On Regtrace and how to disable it correctly

kclemson — Mon, 02 May 2005 21:54:16 GMT

XYZ: This is just a guess, but I suspect the most common cause of someone not knowing it's enabled is if someone's investigating an issue and enables it, and then forgets to turn it off after the issue is resolved. Or that admin might leave the company, and the next admin who's hired doesn't know it's on. This can happen for a lot of settings... and fortunately, whether or not regtrace is enabled is a check that's already done by ExBPA: http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/downloads/2003/ExBPA/default.mspx. That's one of the reasons why running ExBPA regularly in your environment is such a great idea.

re: On Regtrace and how to disable it correctly

XYZ — Sun, 01 May 2005 11:10:20 GMT

Great article!

I saw someone responding with: "Thanks, my Exchange 2003 had Regtrace enabled".

How is that possible if he didnt himself enable it in someway? I assume that default after installing Exchange 2003 it is disabled. I dont think that everybody who installs Exchange 2003 should afterwards disable Regtrace.

Weekend reading

subject: exchange — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 13:28:57 GMT

Weekend reading

subject: exchange — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 12:47:14 GMT

re: On Regtrace and how to disable it correctly

Mohammad Nadeem — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 22:44:19 GMT

Correct, Jason. And it’s mentioned in the article:

"In Exchange 2003, you do NOT need to uncheck the boxes on "Traces" tab in the Regtrace GUI. This actually has been fixed in Exchange Server 2003. But all other steps MUST be followed.

In Windows Server 2003 EXSTRACE.dll was already fixed. The change was ported to PTTRACE.dll. To make this less painful to customers, in E2K3 we set the mask to zero when the OutputTraceType is zero, by making a change in GetTraceFlagsFromRegistry. Or in other words, In GetTraceFlagsFromRegistry, if the output is no tracing, we clear the bit mask. So this is fixed in Exchange 2003."

Thanks for your comments, folks, and I hope this article helps in the field.

re: On Regtrace and how to disable it correctly

Jason Nelson — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 18:37:50 GMT

TI PTTRACE does this automatically - no output means no traces enabled, as does Win2k3's EXSTRACE.

re: On Regtrace and how to disable it correctly

Devin L. Ganger — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 23:15:09 GMT

<i>Regtrace is basically a debugging tool (like Windbg) and trace.atf file is like a user.dmp file. However, they contain different types of data in them. User.dmp has specific 2 GB worth of virtual memory address space (typically from 0x00000000 to 0x7FFFFFFF, unless / 3GB switch is enabled, in which case, it will be 0x00000000 to 0xBFFFFFFF) for specific process, e.g. Store.exe. On the other hand, Regtrace records the activity of what functions get called, and what results get returned from these function calls for each component, e.g. Advanced Queuing (AQ).</i>

Could you move the section I just quoted into the first answer? As written, the answer tells you that Regtrace is a debugging tool but doesn't tell you what it actually does.

Great article, great info! Thank you very much.

re: On Regtrace and how to disable it correctly

Rodito Buan II — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 22:52:03 GMT

thanks, my exchange 2003 had Regtrace enabled.