Solution: Apache Start Issues on Windows 8.1

I recently installed WAMP on my Windows 8.1 and the installation went fine. After installation, when trying to start Apache server, I noticed that Apache server is not starting properly and was conflicting with something pre-installed on my PC. At the very first glance, I thought it may be IIS and I disabled IIS and it worked like a charm. But I needed to run both IIS and Apache at the same instance and hence I started to look for options. I found an easy solution to this. By default, both IIS and Apache listen at port 80 which causes a conflict between them. You can change the listening port of either of the two from 80 to a different port and the issue gets resolved. To change the listening port of IIS, you can take a look at this post of mine. To change the listening port of Apache, you can go to “httpd.conf” file present in the “\wamp\bin\apache\apache2.2.22\conf” folder on your hard drive where you have installed WAMP and change the Listening port from 80 to an unused port. Once the changes are done, restart the services and it works fine.

Everything was OK for a couple of days and suddenly I noticed that I was trying to start WAMP server again and again and it was failing. I cross-checked my IIS settings for port settings and it was not changed in last couple of days. So, it had to be soemthing other than IIS. I checked the System logs and found 2 weird error messages from Apache while trying to start. They were:

• (OS 10048) Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted. : make_sock: could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:80
• no listening sockets available, shutting down

Based on the error messages, it was evident that something else was using Port 80 apart from my Apache. I checked all the running applications and started closing each application one by one to find which application was using the port. As soon as I closed Skype, Apache started perfectly OK. This meant Skype also uses port 80 by default if not configured and can create conflicts when using with Apache. To resolve this issue, follow the below steps:

• Open Skype
• Go to Tools > Options
• Go to Advanced > Connection
• Uncheck “Use Port 80 and 443 as alternatives for incoming connections” and click Save.

  

• Restart Skype & then Apache server.
• All well now!

Hope you like this post and it helps you a bit. Share if you like it. Cheers!