OBIEE - Problem with changing default port to 80 on Windows

In this post I briefly describe the process of changing OBIEE default port and talk about a specific problem we had with port 80 on Windows (and how to solve it.)

The process of changing the default port of Enterprise Installation of OBIEE (unlike simple installation) is rather simple. It was documented many times, in Weblogic documentation and many blogs. For example here, here (and if you insist on doing it without Oracle UI, here.)

In short, the steps are:

1. Enter the weblogic Console (server:7001/console).

2. Select Server / bi_server1 and shut it down.

3. Enter bi_server1 (Configuration / General) and change the Listen Port (from 9704 to 80 in our case)

4. Save.

5. Activate changes.

6. Start bi_server1.

7. Start OBIEE components using EM or command line opmnctl startall.

In our case changing to any port but 80 worked.

The note from support (OBIEE 11g: BI Server does not Start after Changing Analytics Port in Windows Platform (Doc ID 1286157.1)) that required restarting the Windows, didn't help.

Nor the advise to change the Windows StartStopServices.cmd content manually (from 9704 to 80, if needed).

The logical assumption was that the port is used by some other program.

We changed back the port to 9704. It's Windows. We run netstat -a and had ambiguous result. The port 80 was on the list, but it seemed nothing was listening on it.     

A business partner working at that site (Guy Rasis from Vision BI) found a solution. Apparently it's a Windows issue. The solution is described in this blog post: Windows PID:4 taking away port 80:

Just follow these steps to diagnose and resolve your issue:

1. Get pid that is listening port 80: netstat -nao | find “:80″
2. Open task manager, go to processes tab and check “PID” in Menu/View/Select Columns…, then look for the process using the PID found in last step.
3. If it is a normal application or IIS, disable it or uninstall. Some programs (such as Skype) have the option to disable its use of port 80.
4. If it is a System Process—PID 4—you need to disable the HTTP.sys driver which is started on demand by another service, such as Windows Remote Management or Print Spooler on Windows 7 or 2008.
   There is two ways to disable it but the first one is safer:
   1.
   
   • Go to device manager, select “show hidden devices” from menu/view, go to “Non-Plug and Play Driver”/HTTP, double click it to disable it (or set it to manual, some services depended on it).
   • Reboot and use netstat -nao | find “:80″ to check if 80 is still used.
   2.
   
   • Launch RegEdit.
   • Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\HTTP
   • Change the value of "start" to 4, which means disabled.
   • Reboot your computer.

My solution was step 4.