Wowza Streaming Engine fails to start

[Tony_Hewitson]

Morning,

We have an issue with our Wowza install on Windows 2019 serverwhere the service fails to bind to port 8087.

Symptoms

• Logging into the Wowza Streaming Engine Manager Web Page (localhost:8088/enginemanager) it errors stating “Could not connect to server: localhost:8087” which indicates that the service is not completely up and running.
• Looking at the wmsmanager_error.log it appears we can’t connect to the URL on the server (REST API: Authentication: Could not access server:localhost:8087) which is part of the login process.
• Looking at the wmsmanager_accee.log it states “java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused: connect”
• We also started the Wowza Streaming Engine manually at it fails to completely start up and hangs before binding port 8087 to the server IP address (c:\Program Files (x86)\Wowza Media Systems\Wowza Streaming Engine\bin\startup.bat)… The startup script halts before the binding at “INFO server comment - Server threads[h/t]: 120/80”.

We have checked the following to ensure the services are running and there are no other ports being used on the server:

• Turn off all firewalls, checked netstat, disabled any hardening policies, disabled windows defender
• Started manually using startup.bat which halts before the binding of RestServer API Binding attempt on Port 8087
• Java is all correct and environment variables.

We dont know what else to try!!!

Thanks

[Karel_Boek]

Does Wowza bind to the other ports (1935, 8086)? The screenshot doesn’t show the log at the point it tries to bind …

[Tony_Hewitson]

Hi Karel,

The Wowza management engine starts up and can bind to http://localhost:8088/enginemanager but once you login it states "Could not connect to server localhost:8087. "

When running the startup.bat in standalone it hangs and stops running before it gets to the bind phase for the Rest API (1935, 8086) and the screenshot above is all we see with the last line being “Server threads”

Thanks

[Karel_Boek]

The management engine runs in a separate process; so it looks like your Wowza Engine can’t bind to any port at all. If you’re starting WSE manually from the command prompt, make sure you’ve got elevated privileges; or choose “Run As Administrator” when opening the cmd window.

If that doesn’t help, then maybe there’s information in the System or Application Event logs that can point you in the right direction

[Tony_Hewitson]

Morning,

This can now be closed, the problem with our install in case anyone else experiences these issue was to do with internet connectivity and firewalls. Even though we are licensed for dongles on our servers which should not need to access the wowza license servers, when the wowza service start and tries to bind to port 8087, the Wowza service tries to contact the licensing servers on the internet. Our firewalls would deny this flow and hold the communication port open which would stall the startup of the service. The fix was to explicitly allow access to the license servers (even though we are licensed with dongles) and the service would start normally. Hope this helps.