TcpView
by Frank Kim on Apr.18, 2008, under Windows
Sometimes I will start up a server process and get an error about a port already in use. This problem always bedeviled me before as I randomly stopped processes until that port was freed up.
But today a colleague pointed out a great Microsoft tool called TcpView.
TCPView is a Windows program that will show you detailed listings of all TCP and UDP endpoints on your system, including the local and remote addresses and state of TCP connections. On Windows Server 2008, Vista, NT, 2000 and XP TCPView also reports the name of the process that owns the endpoint. TCPView provides a more informative and conveniently presented subset of the Netstat program that ships with Windows. The TCPView download includes Tcpvcon, a command-line version with the same functionality.
With TCPView I discovered and stopped the anti-virus program which was taking up one of the ports that the server needed. This is much nicer than netstat. 
Another nice tool to discover what programs are holding onto files is Process Explorer.
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2 Trackbacks / Pingbacks for this entry
May 6th, 2008 on 6:48 PM
[...] I had to do was stop Skype and everything was fine. Too bad TcpView was not able to tell me that Skype was using port 80. [...]
July 30th, 2008 on 7:54 AM
[...] I recommended TcpView to help figure out what ports are being used. But today I was informed of an even better, more [...]