[Xitami] Used port 80

[Brian {Hamilton Kelly}]

In message <3E5EC1F3.5020506@swbell.net> Alex Glasgow writes:

> Sometimes when I start my system, Xitami won't start correctly.  An 
> error message appears and says that something else is using port 80.  I 
> have tried to disable anything I think is accessing the internet during 
> startup.  And then I try to restart Xitami, but it will still say port 
> 80 is being used.  I have to restart the computer, and then Xitami 
> starts with no problem.  I suspect that whatever was using the port, 
> Xitami grabs the port before the other application can and then the 
> other application has to find another port.  Is there any way I can tell 
> what might be using port 80?  Thanks.

Hmm, in the first line you say "when I start my system", but later say "I
have to restart the computer".  So presumably this error is NOT when you
FIRST start your computer?

Could it be that you've had Xitami running already (and binding to port
80) and that, for some reason that you don't specify, it's been stopped
(either deliberately or accidentally), and that this is why you're
[re]starting Xitami?  I know that under some failure modes, if a process
has had a port listening, and that process dies, it can be that the
TCP/IP stack itself keeps the port noted down as being "in use".  Could
this be the case for you?

Eventually, given enough time, the stack may release the number for
reuse; I used to find with the old TCP/IP stack under OS/2 that this took
about fifteen minutes, although the new one implements additional ioctl
bits that allow one to specify that this shouldn't happen, so with TCP/IP
v4.3 it no longer happens.  As you have discovered, a reboot will always
clear this sort of problem, but is probably somewhat drastic!

I know that for a long time the TCP/IP stack of Windows was based upon an
ancient BSD implementation, although I also know that it's been improved
considerably over the past few years.  OTOH, were this a common
occurrence, I would have expected to see more postings to this list about
such a problem.

(Incidentally, I'm assuming throughout that the error exception that's
being thrown is EADDRINUSE.)

-- 
Brian {Hamilton Kelly}                                          bhk@dsl.co.uk
    "We can no longer stand apart from Europe if we would.  Yet we are
    untrained to mix with our neighbours, or even talk to them".
                                              George Macaulay Trevelyan, 1919