We're sometimes asked how to deal with the error messages like the following:
Port 22 is busy so CompleteFTP could not open it for SFTP on the public site.
Please close the Windows service or application that is using it and restart the CompleteFTP service.
The port and protocol varies depending on the settings.
The solution, as the message says, is to identify the program that's using the port and close it before restarting the CompleteFTP service. Alternatively, you can change CompleteFTP to listen on another port.
It can be hard to identify which application is using a port. Windows does provide tools to do this, but they are not very user-friendly, so I recommend downloading another Microsoft tool,
TCPView. This lists all currently open ports and the processes that opened them. To find the offending process, look for the port number in the 'Local Port' column. Once you find it look at the corresponding value in the 'Process' column; this is the process that needs to be either reconfigured to stop using the port or shut down.
If using TCPView is not an option then you can do the following:
- Open a command prompt.
- Enter the command
netstat -a -o
- Find the port number in the 'Local Address' column (i.e. the value after the colon).
- Note the number in the PID column; this is the Process IDentifier.
- Open Task Manager (by right-clicking in the task-bar).
- If there's not already a PID column then right-click on the column heading to add it.
- Find the PID in the list to identify the process.
