Could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:443
– posted August 23rd, 2006 by Laurence Veale No comments
Could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:443, no listening sockets available
This one’s for the geeks. The error above message above was displayed when I was trying to start Apache (using XAMPP) on my PC. It can happen when there’s some other software running that’s using the 443 port. However, in my case it was a bit misleading and I wasn’t quite sure what was causing the problem. It seemed to just stop working. So what did I do?
Step 1: Check the httpd.conf
In my httpd.conf file (the configuration file for apache), apache was configured to listen on port 80 so what did 443 have to do with it. Port 443 is generally reserved for SSL, but I had no need for SSL on my local PC so where next?
Step 2: Check the ssl.conf file
The httpd.conf file contains include directives to a file called ssl.conf, the first line of which was “Listen 443″, so there was something happening between the httpd.conf file and the ssl.conf file. I commented out any reference to including the ssl.conf file just to see if the error message was a bit of an anomaly. I expected the error message to change once I tried to start Apache again. Low and behold the error message now referred to port 80 rather than 443.
My next step was to identify the culprit. My first idea was looking at any applications that I had installed since last starting up apache. I had installed the Flickr uploader, real player and Skype. So which, if any, was to blame?
Step 3: Identify the culprit: Skype listening on 80:443
The first two candidates yielded no clues, so I looked to Skype.
Under the “Tools” menu, there’s “Options” so I tried that. Under the “General” tab, there’s a link to “Set connection parameters and proxies”.
And there it was staring me in the face, the option to “Use port 80 and 443 as alternatives for incoming connections” was ticked. Unchecking it and restarting Skype, I crossed my fingers before restarting Apache.
Google may well have yielded the answer from the Skype support page but sometimes it’s good to just think and tinker. The end result was that it worked a treat so it was time to start coding, but that’s another story.
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