Stupid error message in IIS
I was trying to run the default website in a default installation of IIS on Vista, and I got this error message:
What the …? Who comes up with crap like this? Unbelievable… even the error code is useless to search for, as apparently there are hundreds of other error conditions in Windows that bring up the same error result. Does Windows have so many error conditions that the value range of a 4 byte uint is no longer large enough?
So what was the problem? Very simple: another application was already listening on ports 80 and 443 (Skype - does that by default, thank you very much). Apparently it’s really hard to have an error message like “Another application (Skype, PID: XXX) is already listening on port 80.”, or at least “Error trying to listen on port 80.” Well, it’s only IIS 7 - maybe they’ll get it right for version 22 or so.
<i>> maybe they’ll get it right for version 22 or so. </i>
Don’t hold your breath.
Comment by Monty — 3/5/2007 @ 6:37 pm - 1 year, 6 months ago
I’ve detected the similarly problem by Apache server (at least version 2.2.4 for Windows). If Skype is running Apache gets by starting the message
"The request operation has failed".
If one starts Apache as first, there is no problem.
Comment by wils0n — 21/5/2007 @ 9:40 am - 1 year, 6 months ago
That bugs me about Windows in general: useless error messages with no context.
"The parameter is incorrect."
"The system could not find the file specified."
That’s awesome when this happens in the middle of a batch file with hundreds of "parameters" invoked and files named.
"Something else is using this file; you can’t open it"
"Something else is using this volume; you can’t unmount it"
Thank Cthulhu for Process Explorer, where you can find out what that something else is.
Comment by Steve — 30/10/2007 @ 10:10 pm - 1 year ago