Sometime back I was working on an incident with a customer who was facing an issue when trying to access his application on Windows Server 2008. I will reproduce the issue using Apache for everyone’s benefit.

If you have a server that has some kind of monitoring tool which is web based or some application which needs port 80 or port 443, then you can face this issue.

Scenario:

I am installing Apache 2.2.11 on my Windows Server 2008 machine which has IIS 7 installed on it. So, wondering why I am trying to install Apache on Windows Server 2008, simply because it’s a web server.

Checkout the screenshot below. Apache will be installed on Port 80 (default setting). Sometimes some application will silently get installed on your machine on port 80.

After sometime, I get the following error:

Checked the Event Viewer and I see the Event as shown below. Looks like Apache wanted to bind itself on 0.0.0.0:80 and fails as it does not have access.

Opened Command prompt as an Administrator and ran “netstat –ano”

I see port 80 is controlled by PID 4 i.e System.

Now, stopped IIS Services by firing “iisreset /stop”.

Started Apache 2.2 service from Services.msc and fired “iisreset” again.

Opened, IIS Manager and I see all websites on port 80 stopped.

Check the Event Viewer

OR

Run “netstat –ano” and this is what I see:

PID 1256 or Apache HTTP Server has control over port 80 and hence the issue.

So what is the issue, checkout the article: You receive a "The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process" error message when you try to start a Web site in the Internet Information Services MMC snap-in.

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Typically, this issue occurs when one or more of the following conditions are true:

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Solution:

1. Run Apache on a different port i.e. other than port 80
2. Get a new IP Address and configure IIS to run on a particular IP Address by configuring ListenOnlyList

On Windows Server 2008, you can use netsh to add the ListenOnlyList.

Verifying the same in the registry.

HTH.