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I'm trying to check if a symbol server is valid. According to this answer the server should serve /pingme.txt (this is also backed by the official docs here). However, the MS symbol server does not seem to adhere to this behavior (anymore?). The following query

curl -L -v http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols/pingme.txt

gives me a 404. Some older, internal symbol servers we have in our company do actually have the /pingme.txt, also symbol servers backed by the local file-system seem to have it.

I've intercepted http requests done by Visual Studio and noticed they are sending User-Agent: Microsoft-Symbol-Server/10.1710.0.0. It doesn't seem to help. Note that accessing PDBs works as expected.

I'm looking for yes/no if the given URL is a symbol server.

thfabian
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    afaik pingme.txt is a 0 byte file that is created and used by dbghelp lib for searching symbols in a symbol path especially existance of pingme.txt is checked if the symbol path does not contain srv* to verify that this folder contains symbols it doesnt arrive from a remote path – blabb Jul 03 '22 at 14:52
  • if you remove the pingme.txt and just ask curl to connect to url the server should return a valid html page with reason for non connection and not a 404

    The data you requested cannot be retrieved.

    You have reached this page because either you or an application that you are running has tried to retrieve debugging data from Microsoft. The requested data is either not available or needs to be retrieved by using the latest Microsoft Symbol Server technology.

    – blabb Jul 03 '22 at 15:04
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    Indeed, pingme.txt is HTTP 404 now. Sad... – Thomas Weller Jul 03 '22 at 16:35

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