Recently, some of our team members were encountering problems with their local development environments. The issue they were having was random or intermittent errors with Internet Information Services (IIS) and a general inability to start websites on ports 80 or 443. It turns out that an update on Skype was causing these errors for us.
Specifically, these are the errors we were seeing in the error logs:
Port 80 error:
Log Name: System
Source: Microsoft-Windows-IIS-W3SVC
Date: 2/7/2011 11:13:42 PM
Event ID: 1004
Task Category: None
Level: Error
Keywords: Classic
User: N/A
Computer: astar01-nb
Description:
The World Wide Web Publishing Service (WWW Service) did not register the URL prefix http://*:80/WcfServiceForGame for site 1. The site has been disabled. The data field contains the error number.
Event Xml:
<Event xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event”>
<System>
<Provider Name=”Microsoft-Windows-IIS-W3SVC” Guid=”{05448E22-93DE-4A7A-BBA5-92E27486A8BE}” EventSourceName=”W3SVC” />
<EventID Qualifiers=”49152″>1004</EventID>
<Version>0</Version>
<Level>2</Level>
<Task>0</Task>
<Opcode>0</Opcode>
<Keywords>0×80000000000000</Keywords>
<TimeCreated SystemTime=”2011-02-08T04:13:42.000000000Z” />
<EventRecordID>256306</EventRecordID>
<Correlation />
<Execution ProcessID=”0″ ThreadID=”0″ />
<Channel>System</Channel>
<Computer>astar01-nb</Computer>
<Security />
</System>
<EventData>
<Data Name=”UrlPrefix”>http://*:80/WcfServiceForGame</Data>
<Data Name=”SiteID”>1</Data>
<Binary>20000780</Binary>
</EventData>
</Event>
Port 443 error:
Log Name: System
Source: Microsoft-Windows-IIS-W3SVC
Date: 2/3/2011 9:31:36 AM
Event ID: 1004
Task Category: None
Level: Error
Keywords: Classic
User: N/A
Computer: astar01-nb
Description:
The World Wide Web Publishing Service (WWW Service) did not register the URL prefix https://*:443/WcfServiceForGame for site 1. The site has been disabled. The data field contains the error number.
Event Xml:
<Event xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event”>
<System>
<Provider Name=”Microsoft-Windows-IIS-W3SVC” Guid=”{05448E22-93DE-4A7A-BBA5-92E27486A8BE}” EventSourceName=”W3SVC” />
<EventID Qualifiers=”49152″>1004</EventID>
<Version>0</Version>
<Level>2</Level>
<Task>0</Task>
<Opcode>0</Opcode>
<Keywords>0×80000000000000</Keywords>
<TimeCreated SystemTime=”2011-02-03T14:31:36.000000000Z” />
<EventRecordID>250957</EventRecordID>
<Correlation />
<Execution ProcessID=”0″ ThreadID=”0″ />
<Channel>System</Channel>
<Computer>astar01-nb</Computer>
<Security />
</System>
<EventData>
<Data Name=”UrlPrefix”>https://*:443/WcfServiceForGame</Data>
<Data Name=”SiteID”>1</Data>
<Binary>20000780</Binary>
</EventData>
</Event>
To correct this, you can follow these steps:
- Within Skype, select Tools from the top menu
- Select Options
- Select Advanced from the left sidebar
- Select Connection from the Advanced sub-menu
- Uncheck the Use port 80 and 443 as alternatives for incoming connections checkbox
The advanced settings screen is shown in the image below:
One thing I should probably mention. If you disable this setting within Skype, you may encounter connectivity issues with Skype. If this occurs – there’s probably a firewall issue or network policy which blocks the alternate ports Skype uses.
In a very short amount of time – Nimbo will be rolling out Microsoft’s Office 365 which features a new and improved set of cloud based tools for personal and enterprise collaboration. At that time we probably won’t rely on Skype as much as we currently do.
- Ira Bell
