What do you mean the Web Server can’t start

There is nothing more fun then logging into your windows servers and there are more new patches to install to fix security problems and as per usual Windows must reboot.  I have Redhat servers that have never been rebooted but my Windows machines regularly have to rebooted just because.  Nothing frustrates me more as an administrator then rebooting servers, so many bad things can happen when you reboot.

For example on the weekend my servers were forced to restart and when they came back online my Web Server was down because the HTTP port was in use by another service.  This is odd because I didn’t install anything new however in my case it turned out to be the KDC proxy service that was installed when I did some changes to my remote desktop services.

In order to figure out what service was causing the problem in this case, there is a nice quick trick you can use to figure out what services rely on the HTTP and HTTPs ports.  From a command prompt if you issue the command:

net stop http

This will list out all the services that will be impacted when you execute this command.  In my case I don’t need the KDC proxy service to be running, so I shut down the service, and I was able to bring the WebLogic server online and my client was able to login to their environment from the web again.