18 Nov, 2006
I was doing some web development this morning and after installing some software I needed to do a restart. After the machine came back up, I tried to access the local site that I had been working on, but it was trying to download “index.php” rather than serving it up in my browser, which was weird.
I opened up IIS and for some reason my Default Web Site was stopped. I tried starting it, but got this great error message, “unexpected error 0×8ffe2740 occurred.” Wonderful. Thankfully, the first result on Google was a MS site for this error and the reason. The problem is that something else had already taken port 80, so my site couldn’t use it. (As an aside, you’d think IIS could catch this error a little better, its not a very exotic situation). So I switched my site to port 8080 and it worked, but I still wanted to find out what was using port 80.
After running “netstat -a” from the command line, I could definitely see that something was using it, but didn’t know what. If you run “netstat -a -b” you will get a list of all ports, and the program thats using it as well, and low and behold, Skype had decided to use port 80. I quit Skype and my web site started with no problem. I believe that Skype searches for an open port to use when it starts up, so it must have gotten to port 80 before IIS could and took it, lame.
7 Oct, 2006
My latest post about my Skype phone being disconnected reminded me to post another Skype related post.
I get awful cell phone service in my house from Sprint. I can’t even have a conversation unless I go out on my front steps or out in the backyard, and in Minnesota winters thats not really doable. So, when people call me I typically answer and quickly tell them that I’ll call back and simply hang up, cause they probably didn’t hear me anyways. Some of my friends are used to this now, like Jake, he hears me squawk something and then waits for the callback.
I’ve seriously considered signing up for SkypeIn which is a service that Skype offers where you can assign a telephone number to your Skype account so that people can call you as if your Skype phone is a real phone. It costs about $6 bucks a month, which is a small fraction of our cell phone bill, so this is very enticing.
The problem is related to how my phone stopped working for a few days. If my phone is unreliable, people aren’t going to call it, they’ll just call my cell phone instead which defeats the whole purpose. If you buy a landline phone at Radio Shack and plug it in, that thing is reliable as hell, they never just stop working, so you can be confident when you give out your phone number that the phone will ring when they call.
I still might get it soon just because the cost barrier is so low theres not much to lose, then I just have the problem of getting people to call that number before my cell number, which will take some time I think.
