Skype & Apache conflict

I was setting up XAMPP on my Windows XP and for some reason Apache wouldn’t start using the XAMPP Control Panel.

So I tried starting Apache using the xampp/apache_start.bat.  That’s were I saw the problem.  Apache server is giving me this error:

“(OS 10048)Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port)
is normally permitted.  : make_sock: could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:80
no listening sockets available, shutting down
Unable to open logs”

I tried running netstat -b, to check what program is currently using port 80, but I couldn’t find it exactly.  Anyway, it only indicated Yahoo and Skype having outside connections.

So I decided to isolate the problem by turning off the programs one at a time.  On first try I closed Skype and tried running apache again and it worked.

This only shows that skype is using port 80 for some reason to connect to the outside world knowing most likely that this port is open for most firewalls.

So to confirm the theory, I started skype again and tried to start apache and as expected, it failed to start.

So there, there must be some way for them to work together, but as for me, I’d rather close skype until I need to use it, I don’t like some program acting like a webserver and doesn’t ask for my permission to do so.

cakePHP calls crashing Apache

While doing some experimenting on cakePHP, I kept getting win32 exception errors from apache.exe causing it to stop.  It doesn’t happen on my other PHP programs.  So I thought maybe it had something to do with how cakePHP is using PHP and apache.

To figure out what was happening, I allowed Visual Studio to debug the apache.exe at the point of the error.  While in debug mode, I checked the call-stack to see any information that might give me a clue and there it was.  The last call was ZendOptimization().

Now since I’m not really using Zend extensions on my programs.  I thought maybe I should try disabling this just to isolate the problem.  To do that commented out the Zend options in my php.ini.  After a few tries, it still wasn’t working, then realized there were 2 copies of the php.ini one was under the xampp\php and another was under xampp\apache\bin.  Well you guessed it, I should have been editing the one under xampp\apache\bin for this to take effect.  And of course don’t forget to restart your apache.