On a number of occasions I have tried setting up a piece of software with a web interface that listens on port 80 to avoid having to type the port number in the address bar and allowing me to set up a simple, descriptive name in my DNS server (e.g. typing backup takes me to my backup software’s web interface). Now, I understand that only a single process can listen on a specific port at a time and thus often add additional IP addresses to my servers. The problem comes when IIS (Internet Information Services) is also installed on the same machine.
IIS has a habit (by design) of binding to all IP addresses on the machine, even if they are not being used for a website. This is a common enough problem that Microsoft have a knowledge base article describing this exact issue with a workaround. So, without further ado, here are the steps required to set IIS to only listen on the IP addresses you define;
- Open a command prompt
- Run the following command replacing the xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx with the IP address you would like IIS to listen on
netsh http add iplisten xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx - If the IP address is added successfully, you will get a message saying “IP address successfully added”.
- All done! To check what addresses are being listened on, you can run the following command;
netsh http show iplisten