Port 80 permanently blocked – how to unblock?

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Hi, dear AskWoody community.
Recently I ran into a misconfig, that drives me crazy. My laptop seems to reject web development, since my port 80 is blocked.

Webdesign machine is Windows 10, winver 21H2.
I installed XAMPP, as I did before and I cant make required services to run.
The thing is, that port 80 is in use by “SYSTEM” and I cant find, whats blocking the port. Its just:
PORT 80, SYSTEM, LISTENING, PID 4

And there is nothing I can do about it. Is port 80 defautly blocked that way? Do I miss something? I can re-map Apache to the port 90, but it seems to not fix the issue, the Apache refuses to start even on port 90.

Please help, it would be much appreciated, before I wipe the system and re-install from scratch. But something tells me, that it coud be “def behavior” of Windows 10.
Any advice?

Thanks,
doriel.

Dell Latitude E6530, Intel Core i5 @ 2.6 GHz, 4GB RAM, W10 20H2 Enterprise

HAL3000, AMD Athlon 200GE @ 3,4 GHz, 8GB RAM, Fedora 29

PRUSA i3 MK3S+

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Do you have Internet Connection sharing enabled on any interface? That enables uPNP which might cause a running web server instance (in http.sys).

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No, my internet connection is not shared, nothing external is connected neither through USB, ethernet cable nor WiFi. Ill remember to check this next time someone has this issue.
I tried Paul T’s solution and it works for me. Thanks for support anyway.

Dell Latitude E6530, Intel Core i5 @ 2.6 GHz, 4GB RAM, W10 20H2 Enterprise

HAL3000, AMD Athlon 200GE @ 3,4 GHz, 8GB RAM, Fedora 29

PRUSA i3 MK3S+

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I change the web server port to 81 when that happens. You can still test, just not for production. If you need to use it externally for production, set a router port forward from 80 to 81, or whatever you have chosen.

cheers, Paul

1 user thanked author for this post.

doriel

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Yes, perfect, re-setting the port to 81 works and Apache service is started now.

Its for testing purposes, so this solution is acceptable to me. Thanks a lot for swift aswers, friends! Helped me a lot.

Dell Latitude E6530, Intel Core i5 @ 2.6 GHz, 4GB RAM, W10 20H2 Enterprise

HAL3000, AMD Athlon 200GE @ 3,4 GHz, 8GB RAM, Fedora 29

PRUSA i3 MK3S+

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Port 80 information here with an explanation that may help:

https://www.techopedia.com/definition/15709/port-80

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1 user thanked author for this post.

doriel

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If its your windows firewall thats infact blocking it you can open the port by:

Start -> Run

Enter this: netsh firewall set portopening tcp 80 ENABLE

Press OK.

(If my memory doesn’t serve me wrong)

EDIT: You need administrator rights to perform this

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The first thing to try is to use the Windows command line to check what is using port 80. Run this command: netstat -ano | find “:80” This will list all the processes that are using port 80. This should give you an idea of what’s blocking the port, and you may be able to take action to stop it. If that doesn’t work, then you could try disabling any antivirus software and firewall programs you have running on your computer. There may be a setting in those programs that is blocking port 80. Finally, you could try manually changing which port Apache is using for its web server, as you suggested.

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