Apache HTTPD: Address already in use: make_sock: could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:443
During my latest Apache configuration change I ran into an issue where I wasn’t able to restart/start. This was the first time I encountered this and I was fairly positive the issue wasn’t due to my configuration changes. I also knew that a port can only be used by one application or daemon at a time so that clued me in that something else was already using the port. While I can’t give a definitive cause for the situation, I can give pointers on resolving the issue. Note that this pertains to Apache running on Linux so your mileage may vary.
Here’s what I encountered after I ran the ./apachectl start command:
(98)Address already in use: make_sock: could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:443
no listening sockets available, shutting down
Unable to open logs
To solve the issue I first tried the following to see if there were some running httpd processes that shouldn’t have been running at this point:
ps -aux |grep httpd
This revealed no processes running. Next I tried netstat and that didn’t reveal anything either. Then I decide to view all processes with ps -aux, and after close inspection found the culprit:
root 5004 0.0 0.0 4384 4 ? S Apr25 0:00 bash
mysql 5095 0.0 0.7 41968 7980 ? S Apr25 0:47 ./mysqld --user mysql
apache 7323 0.0 0.0 3014368 0 ? TW Apr25 0:01
There was a phantom process (line 3 above) running as the apache user but didn’t have a command associated with it. Knowing that nothing else on the server runs as the apache user, I decided to kill the varmit:
kill -9 7323
After doing this, I was able to start the apache server again.
Has anyone else run into this issue and more importantly why it happened?
Yes, yesterday. Entirely coincidentally as I was originally reading your 20 tomcat tips.
I did exactly the same thing as you to kill the process.
No idea what caused it, as I killed the process before inspecting it further.
It was on a server with Plesk though, which was having trouble executing an upgrade.
Pid
22 Aug 07 at 5:53 am
Thanks. This worked perfectly for me on a Suse 10 install running Apache 2. In my case the processes were running as wwwrun, but same difference. I just killed all the processes running as wwwrun, and was able to then do a rcapache2 restart with success.
Aran
3 Dec 07 at 11:20 am
Thank you.
Jenny
2 Apr 08 at 11:03 pm
Any pointers as to why this comes for windows
Sandeep shukla
26 Nov 08 at 1:04 am
I had this same problem on mac osx server after restarting the box it would not start the web server – no config/permission changes which was quiet strange.
thanks a lot this solution worked fine for me.
gio
14 Jan 09 at 11:05 am
It worked for me too..
Thanks for the help
Sampurna
26 May 09 at 6:24 am
Hi,
I got this problem today running Fedora10.
In my case not even start after power down helped.
No Apache user found with ps -aux.
I could do with a hint..
Per
10 Jun 09 at 2:36 pm