We have an internal, isolated lab network that does not have internet access. We often run various tools on PCs on this network that require symbols corresponding to the Windows/MSVC(pp)/MFC binaries installed on these PCs. An example of one of the tools we run is the Visual Studio stand-alone profiler (ie vsperfcmd/vsperfreport/etc). Currently we can pretty easily get our company's symbols... and through some digging around our local symbol cache on the Internet exposed PCs, I can manually find symbols that correspond to binaries on the PCs in the lab network. This is a very tedious, error prone process and its pretty annoying. I'd like to find a better way to automatically look up the symbols from our lab network.
Ideally I'd like to setup some kind of symbol server on the regular network that is visible to the lab network so these tools can work correctly. Is there an accepted way to do this? Can I mirror the MS symbol server or provide some kind of proxy to the local network?
Sounds like your lab is not completely isolated, since you have machines that are connected to both regular intranet network as well as to the lab network.
In this configuration you can use SymProxy: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff558846(v=vs.85).aspx. You will have to install it to the dual-NIC'ed machine that is visible from lab and is able to fetch files from internet.