The Smart Connect service on local computer started and then stopped

Products

• Web Security.cloud

Issue/Introduction

The Smart Connect service would not start after being deployed via group policy or manually installed.

There is one visible error message that appears during the installation or when restarting the service:

Windows error:

The Symantec Web Security.cloud Smart Connect service on local computer started and then stopped. Some services stop automatically if they are not in use by other services or programs.

The other error message can be located in the agent.log file under C:\Program Files (x86)\Symantec.cloud\Smart Connect

Agent.log file:

bind: An attempt was made to access a socket in a way forbidden by its access permissions.

Environment

This applies to Smart Connect version 1.6 and above, running on the following Windows operating systems:

• Windows Vista

• Windows 7

• Windows 8.x

• Windows 10

Cause

The error message in the agent.log file indicates that the Smart Connect service could not bind to the listening port (default port is 80, which was specified in the agentconfigure.xml), as another application/service is currently using this port.

Resolution

To find out what application/service is running currently on port 80 and kill the process, please run the following commands:

1.  Open command prompt as an administrator and entered
2. Type: c:\> netstat -ano | findstr 0.0:80
   You should then see the following output:

TCP    0.0.0.0:80             0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING       4 (PID)

3.   Type c:\> tasklist /fi "PID eq 4 (Where 4 is the PID as shown above)
       You should then see the following output:

Image Name                     PID Session Name        Session#    Mem Usage
==========================================================
System                           4 Services                   0      8,864 K

Note: In Windows 10, the service running on port 80 could be World Wide Web Publishing Service (W3SVC), which is used to manage the HTTP protocol and HTTP performance counters for Internet Information Services (IIS).

 

If unable to kill the process, as a workaround the agentconfigure.xml file can be changed to use a different listening port as shown is step 3 in technical article "Customize the Smart Connect configuration file". It is strongly recommended that a privileged port (one below 1024) be used.