[SOLVED] socket.error: [Errno 10013] An attempt was made to access a socket in a way forbidden by its access permissions

socket.error: [Errno 10013] An attempt was made to access a socket in a way forbidden by its access permissions

I'm trying to create a custom TCP stack using Python 2.6.5 on Windows 7 to serve valid http page requests on port 80 locally. But, I've run into a snag with what seems like Windows 7 tightened up security. This code worked on Vista.

Here's my sample code:

import SocketServer
import struct

class MyTCPHandler(SocketServer.BaseRequestHandler):
    def handle(self):
        headerText = """HTTP/1.0 200 OK
                        Date: Fri, 31 Dec 1999 23:59:59 GMT
                        Content-Type: text/html
                        Content-Length: 1354"""
        bodyText = "<html><body>some page</body></html>"
        self.request.send(headerText + "\n" + bodyText)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    HOST, PORT = "localhost", 80
    server = SocketServer.TCPServer((HOST, PORT), MyTCPHandler)
    server.serve_forever()

C:\python>python TestServer.py Traceback (most recent call last):
File "TestServer.py", line 19, in server = SocketServer.TCPServer((HOST, PORT), MyTCPHandler) File "C:\Python26\lib\SocketServer.py", line 400, in init self.server_bind() File "C:\Python26\lib\SocketServer.py", line 411, in server_bind self.socket.bind(self.server_address) File "", line 1, in bind

socket.error: [Errno 10013] An attempt was made to access a socket in a way forbidden by its access permissions

How exactly do I get this to work on Windows 7?

[Edit on 5/5/2010 @ 2344 PDT] This answer explains that the error is caused by the need for elevated / superuser privileges when accessing ports lower than 1024. I'm going to try using a higher port number to see if that works. However, I still would like to know why my local admin account can't access port 80.

Solution

On Windows Vista/7, with UAC, administrator accounts run programs in unprivileged mode by default.

Programs must prompt for administrator access before they run as administrator, with the ever-so-familiar UAC dialog. Since Python scripts aren't directly executable, there's no "Run as Administrator" context menu option.

It's possible to use ctypes.windll.shell32.IsUserAnAdmin() to detect whether the script has admin access, and ShellExecuteEx with the 'runas' verb on python.exe, with sys.argv[0] as a parameter to prompt the UAC dialog if needed.