Vladimir Scherbina has recently released a useful IDA plugin that enhances IDA’s now built-in support for loading symbols via the symbol server to allow custom symbol server paths. This is something I personally have been wanting for some time; IDA’s PDB loading mechanism overrides _NT_SYMBOL_PATH with a hardcoded value of the Microsoft symbol server. This breaks my little trick for injecting symbol server support into programs that do not already support it, which is fairly annoying. Now, with Vladimir’s plugin, you can have IDA use a custom symbol server without having to hack the PDB plugin and change its hardcoded string constant for the Microsoft symbol server path. (Plus, you can have IDA use your local downstream store cache as well – another disadvantage to how IDA normally loads symbols via PDB.)