Having started a new job in Februari, it has been a busy few weeks with not much time (or energy) for blogging.
Setting up a development environment for one of my new projects last week, I found that I had problems getting a test server in WSAD to run https on port 443. Any other port (like the default 9443) would work just fine; but if I added a https transport on port 443 the server log would show "unable to start transport https" and the server would fail to start. The stack trace, as well as any mail thread I could find, would indicate that most likely something else was already running on port 443. None of my new collegues knew what could be wrong, although several remembered having had trouble setting up their own environment.
I had already triple-checked and was sure port 443 was not in use. Furthermore, near the top of the stacktrace, I saw a NullPointerException which led me to believe something was somehow wrong with the https transport itself.
I must have spent a day searching and pulling my hair out before I stumbled across this article on IBM Developerworks; look about halfway down the page. As it turns out, you cannot add secure ports in the server configuration panel in WSAD; you can only modify the port number of the existing one. If you throw away the original https transport, as I did on one of my test server configurations, you will not be able to add a https transport on any port (not even 9443) and have the server start; at least not using the server configuration panel. If you need https on port 443, the simplest way is to create a server using the default ports (9080 and 9443) and then modify the https to use 443. I did this and added http on port 80, after which the server ran without problems.
