IIS Manager Error - Unable to bind to the underlying transport for [::]:80.The process cannot access the file because

Question

I know that this question has been asked in multiple forums and have several versions of the answers.. Unfortunately, none of those answers helped me out to resolve my issue.

I stood up an AWS EC2 instance of Windows Server 2016 and installed IIS, MSMQ, Windows Process Activation Service and few other things.. When I cracked open my IIS Manager, I noticed that the "Default Web Site" is stopped and when I tried to start it I get an error "The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process (Exception from HRESULT:0x80070020)". Tried to dig a little more and found these two exceptions in my Event Viewer:

Unable to bind to the underlying transport for [::]:80. The IP Listen-Only list may contain a reference to an interface which may not exist on this machine. The data field contains the error number.

The World Wide Web Publishing Service (WWW Service) did not register the URL prefix http://:80/SmsHandler for site 1. The site has been disabled. The data field contains the error number.*

Researching more online I found more than 2 dozen articles on this issue and more than 95% of them saying that the potential application that might be conflicting with IIS and using port 80 and 443 could be Skype.. But I DON'T HAVE SKYPE installed on my server..

I ran the "netstat -aon" command and found this:

C:\Windows\system32>netstat -aon | findstr :80

TCP 169.254.170.2:80 0.0.0.0:0 LISTENING 1164

Going by what's mentioned in other articles online.. I tried to trace down the PID - 1164 in my Task Manager and found that its the "Service Host - Local System" process having 15 System services running into it.. There's no way I can kill that process to make my IIS work..

I then tried to change the Bindings in my IIS to listen on a different port than 80 and was able to get it up and running.. But I don't want IIS to run on any other port than 80 since I don't want the user to specify the port in the URL every time when they hit the website..

I'm now running short of ideas here.. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I ran into a similar issue, but not with port 80. In my case it was because the ip address [::] wasn't allowed to listen on any port. Adding it to the ListenOnly list in the registry fixed the issue. From an admin command prompt:

netsh http add iplisten ipaddress=::

From this thread.