Solving the “Permission denied: make_sock: could not bind to address” issue when starting Apache on Linux

Does this looks familiar ?

[laurent2@centos2 conf]$ sudo service httpd start
Starting httpd: (13)Permission denied: make_sock: could not bind to address [::]:8082
(13)Permission denied: make_sock: could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:8082
no listening sockets available, shutting down
Unable to open logs
 [FAILED]

No, it’s not because I’m not running this as root (as explained here, here and there) : you can see in the command above that I’ve used the sudo command !

It’s (again) because SELinux is preventing the httpd process to listen on port 8082.

This can be checked by having a look at the SELinux log files:

• if the auditd daemon is running, SELinux denials are in /var/log/audit/audit.log.
• if the daemon is not running, you’ll find them in /var/log/messages.

[laurent2@centos2 conf]$ sudo tail /var/log/audit/audit.log
[SNIP]
type=AVC msg=audit(1350478371.269:183): avc: denied { name_bind } for pid=3207 comm="httpd" src=8082 scontext=unconfined_u:system_r:httpd_t:s0 tcontext=system_u:object_r:port_t:s0 tclass=tcp_socket
[SNIP]

To make sure that SELinux is indeed the culprit, you can simply temporarly disable it to see if that solves your issue:

[laurent2@centos2 conf]$ getenforce
Enforcing
[laurent2@centos2 conf]$ sudo setenforce 0
[sudo] password for laurent2:
[laurent2@centos2 conf]$ getenforce
Permissive
[laurent2@centos2 conf]$ sudo service httpd start
Starting httpd: [ OK ]

Now the reason why SELinux prevents httpd to start listening on port 8082 is because only a certain number of ports are allowed:

[laurent2@centos2 conf]$ sudo semanage port -l | grep http
 http_cache_port_t tcp 3128, 8080, 8118, 8123, 10001-10010
 http_cache_port_t udp 3130
 http_port_t tcp 80, 443, 488, 8008, 8009, 8443
 pegasus_http_port_t tcp 5988
 pegasus_https_port_t tcp 5989

(by the way: if semanage is not installed, check here)

From there, you can choose to either disable SELinux, use a port that is currently allowed, or add the port you want to use to the list of authorized ports.