Thursday, November 22, 2012

Skype and Port 80

I was trying to start the Apache web server installed on my desktop, to test something in PHP. But I kept getting the error "Operation failed". Even re-installing Apache did not help. I was at my wit's end trying to figure out what had gone wrong because the web server was running fine a few days ago. Then I tried running httpd in debug mode (httpd.exe -e debug). This told me the reason for Apache not starting was that some other program was blocking port 80 on localhost. But common sense told me I had no such programs running on my machine. A quick Google search later, I realized that the villain was none other than Skype. Skype allows users who are behind firewalls to use port 80 and 443 as an alternatives for incoming connections. Disabling the use of these two ports for Skype will free them up for Apache. Now I'm able to do my PHP testing. Here's the link that helped me solve the problem:

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