Finding the McAfee/Foundstone WSDigger utility can be a challenge, as the product was freely available on McAfee’s website for some time, but has not been updated in some time.
SourceForge has a version available for download: https://sourceforge.net/projects/foundstone/
After downloading WSDigger into a Windows (virtual machine), return to this Discussion Question and let us know your experiences.
What installation challenges did you encounter?
What were you able to uncover with WSDigger? Were there items you wanted or expected to find, but could not?
William Bailey says
If you don’t already have a virtual machine with Windows operating system, Microsoft makes available a 90-day evaluation for development/testing purposes:
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/
Vince Kelly says
Guys,
I’m posting this because I’ve wasted a *LOT* of cycles on this so the intent is to not have anyone else get burned as well – *PLEASE* post how you got it to work if you did. The WSDigger tool does not appear to work and there doesn’t appear to be any public UDDI registries still around even if it did. Below is the email that I sent to Prof. Bailey asking for help – I’ll post here if I get a response:
[SNIP]
Professor,
I’ve been trying to get the WSDigger tool to work – there is no .msi installer and even when you invoke the executable directly from the \bin directory it fails (I’ve included screen shots of it crashing below).
Even if I could get the program to work there doesn’t appear to be *any* public registries available to query. Per the link below, Microsoft, IBM and SAP shut down their public UDDI services in 2005. The Microsoft site is one that is most often used in the WSDigger manual, I’ve searched around and it looks like the entire UDDI initiative is dead – I could only find *ONE* suggestion (made back in 2009) for a possible public public registry to try ( http://uddi-jbossoverlord.rhcloud.com/ ) but its a dead link if you browse to it.
Can you please bounce back with:
1. How did you get WSDigger to install on your machine?
2. What was the uddi link that you used to do the searches?
2005 Article on Microsoft, IBM and SAP shutting down their public UDDI registries:
Microsoft, IBM, SAP discontinue UDDI registry effort
Project based on Web services standard said to be no longer necessary
https://www.infoworld.com/article/2673442/application-development/microsoft–ibm–sap-discontinue-uddi-registry-effort.html
2009 Stackoverflow article asking if *any* public UDDI registries are still around:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1491926/are-there-any-public-uddi-registries-available
Dan Bilenker says
I had no issues with the install, but encountered a similar situation to yours in that I couldn’t execute anything. Did you ever resolve your situation?
Jonathan Reid Kerr says
No luck here, either.
Vince Kelly says
no. I really don’t think there is anything out there to search even if it did work:);)
Duy Nguyen says
I was able to get a Windows VM up and installed WSDigger, the installation was pretty simple. The only issue I found was that the .net framework had to be the exact one prompted for.
Not sure what the assignment was, were we suppose to target a specific WSDL?
Vince Kelly says
…I’d be very interested in how exactly you got it to work I downloaded and unzipped the program but it didn’t come with a windows installer/msi executable. When I run WSDigger directly from the bin directory it crashes when I do a search ( a mutex failure). From what I can see, WSDigger is written in C# and relies on .NET1.1 which is depreciated as you know.
I’m waiting for a response back on how Prof. got it to work but how did you get it to work?
As far as the public UDDI registry, per my post above, I don’t think that there are any – at least that I could find. Microsoft, IBM and SAP shut down their public registries awhile ago. I did find a link to (what apparently was) one of the last remaining registries but it was a dead link like the others.
2005 Article on Microsoft, IBM and SAP shutting down their public UDDI registries:
Microsoft, IBM, SAP discontinue UDDI registry effort
Project based on Web services standard said to be no longer necessary
https://www.infoworld.com/article/2673442/application-development/microsoft–ibm–sap-discontinue-uddi-registry-effort.html
2009 Stackoverflow article asking if *any* public UDDI registries are still around:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1491926/are-there-any-public-uddi-registries-available
Reply
Jonathan Reid Kerr says
I was able to download and run WSDigger on the Windows VM. However, upon trying to search the UDDI url, it comes back with an error:
Exception has occurred in UDDI searching thread
Information : The wait completed due to an abandoned mutex.
When I try to run another search, it will look like it is working for one second, then the application closes.
Vince Kelly says
the exact same thing here. I’m stretching here because I don’t know how it works so I have absolutely no idea about what I’m talking about but I’m *guessing* that the message seems to be pointing to the version of .NET or a .dll problem. The reason I think this might be the case is that a mutex is a multithreading mechanism that’s used to lock system resources (like a file for example) so that other apps or OS functions don’t grab the resource while its trying to use it. Timeouts in multithreading often occur because there’s some kind of synchronization problem (a call to lock or unlock the resource isn’t formatted correctly or the arguments passed by the call themselves have changed).
In other words, if I’m guessing right, the UI isn’t the problem, the problem occurs when it tries to go spin off the thread for doing the search. I’ll try loading it onto an XP VM if I get a chance today.
But whatever the case, even if it works on an depreciated version of .NET I don’t think that there are any UDDI public registries available to search anyway.
Jonathan Reid Kerr says
From what I understand, based on my look into the error, it has to do with the code not releasing the mutex object when abandoning the thread… So pretty much exactly what you said. Though that also means it may not *exactly* be the program causing it. I have no idea if it is an issue with the Windows VM, that version of .NET, or the program itself.
Though as you said, even if it does work there doesn’t seem to be anything to search.
Dan Bilenker says
So were we sent on a “wild turkey chase” over break?
Vince Kelly says
….all I can say Dan is “gobble, gobble, gobble’;)
Vince Kelly says
….as you say Jonathan, it probably wasn’t the program that caused it at all – many OS’s will start a timer when a program asks the OS to give it a mutex or a lock so that it can execute a multithreaded task. When that OS timer pops in the OS it will abend/preempt the program so that a misbehaving program doesn’t lock everything else out. At one time MS DOS and early Windows were notorious for allowing programmers/programs to do anything they wanted at any OS privilege level – hence the famous Windows reputations for crashes, hangs and blue screens of death.
I think this may be a situation where we have an obsolete piece of code from that era that expected it could just do anything that it wanted -but it is running on a modernized version of Windows that basically said “nope, not any more buddy”;);)
Jonathan Reid Kerr says
Did you ever get WSDigger to work on the XP VM? Would be interesting to know if that was the issue, or if something else is causing it.
Vince Kelly says
…no I never got the chance. Given that there aren’t any public registries to test against I figured that there wouldn’t be any point anyway, I’m not sure that simply using XP would even do the trick because according to an old manual that I found (from June 2005), it requires a specific version of .NET (v1.1) so you’d need to start picking at the XP VM to see if its supported. I’ll send everyone on this thread the manual – page 4 bottom talks about .NET requirement. Let me know how you make out.
Vince Kelly says
Arghh! I’m probably missing something here but there doesn’t seem to be a way to upload files on this blog nor does there seem to be a way to get individual temple email addresses from the names on this list – the only one I have is Duy’s email so I sent the WSDigger manual to him. Email me if you’d like me to send you the manual
Brandan Mackowsky says
After much trial over the last few weeks, I was able to set up a virtual machine by downloading the default windows VM and get the WSDigger download file onto the machine. However, as soon as I launched it, I was unable to get started. Based on the feedback from those above, I assume I am experiencing a similar issue.