How to disable Windows Error Reporting on Windows 2008

Sometimes programs crash on Windows and we all know that Windows might asks us to report back to them or just for us to be notified that something did not work properly.
This is quite good for users but not for automating jobs on machines.

I was setting up a Windows 64-bit machine to run our Firefox builds and I noticed that every time we reached the "make -k check" step the job would hang until it timed out.
I decided to run the step manually and discovered that we would get a prompt for the user to intervene.

jsapi-tests.exe crashed when running "make -k check" and Windows notifies the user

At first ted let me know that it might be related to disabling the JIT debugger (Visual Studio allows you to attach a debugger on programs outside of itself just-in-time!) but I figured out that it was disabled and this was the "post attaching the debugger" message.

I filed a bug to disable the jsapi-tests.exe crash until it gets fixed but soon after I found a post that gave me an idea.
I searched for "prevent stopped working" and I noticed this low-rated comment on stackoverflow that mentions how to disable the "Windows Customer Experience Improvement Program".
This was not what I wanted but it inspired me to look for something that would stop Windows from notifying the users of an error.
I filtered for the word "Error" (because that is what you do on Administrative tools on Windows instead of searching). After looking for a while I found "Prevent display of the user interface for critical errors" and voila! It did the trick.

Here are the steps I followed which I documented on the Win64 reference platform documentation:

• Run "gpedit.msc"
• Computer configuration -> Administrative Templates
• Windows Components -> Windows Error Reporting
• Set "Prevent display of the user interface for critical errors" to Enabled

From now on this machine won't let the user know that a program crashed and will just carry on.

Happy Windows automation!

---

This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Windows 64 bit builds - commencing

I am pretty excited to be working on this project since soon I will be buying a Windows 64 bit machine and I would like to take advantage of all types of performance improvements I can from my browser.

This project can be broken down in a fast way like this:

• get a 64 bit machine from IT with a 64 bit Windows 2008
• install the right tool-chain
• generate manually the build
• pass it to someone to QA it
• make sure that Windows 08 can be managed by OPSI
• automate the build process
• clone more machines and include them on a pool
• move these machines to production
• run unit tests on Talos Rev3 machines
• run talos
• debug builds
• symbols

For the curious, bug 558448 will be tracking this.

A bonus will be to investigate how to create Windows 32 bit builds on these machines since we don't want to have two separate pool of builders. The only problem is that it will definitively turn into scope creep if we choose to include it since the beginning. I will have to evaluate this with more time.

Any experienced Win32/64 cross-compiler guy out there?

---

This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.