Locally testing a self signed SSL certificate in IIS manager and getting “The process cannot access the file because it’s being used by another process” error

Making changes to our shopping cart for Google Analytics, Conversion, and eCommerce tracking. In order to test a local version of the shopping cart I had to make and use a self signed SSL certificate.

 

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Every time I try to start the site “learning2” with the binding to port 443 (https) in IIS Manager I get an error message:

You receive a “Cannot Start Web Site” error “The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process” error message when you try to start a Web site in the Internet Information Services MMC snap-in

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Reason and Resolution: Another process is using port 80 or port 443 on the computer that is running IIS. By default, IIS uses port 80 as the default TCP port and port 443 for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). In order find out what’s using port 80 and 443, for HTTP and SSL respectively, you would enter this at the command prompt:

netstat –ano | find “:443”

netstat –ano | find “:80”

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In the output see the process ID “9820” for localhost using port 443? Next start windows task manager and look at the “Processes” to find out the culprit. You might have to turn on the PID column to see it (view->select columns). For me it was Skype that showed up as the process that matched the process ID “9820”. After turning Skype off entirely, I was finally able to start the site that was bound to port 443 in IIS Manager. Hope this article helps anyone else getting stuck on starting up a site in IIS. It could be a number of other programs using the ports so the best thing to do is check using the netstat command and matching up the PID with what you have in Task Manager.

Here’s the Skype setting that was causing the issue (Tools –> Options –> Advance –> Connection) see below. You could also leave Skype running and just turn off the ‘”Use port 80 and 443 as alternatives for incoming connections”. Remember to restart Skype to propagate the settings.

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