Binary War

I recently had an issue installing Network Policy Server (NPS) in Windows Server 2008.

This was a brand new server, deployed from a known-good VMware template several days before.  The only software on it was the Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager Console, which required IIS.

I tried to add the NPS component of the Network Policy and Access Services role so that I could use this server for radius authentication for Cisco network switches.

It kept failing!  I tried several things. Rebooted the server, tried installing available Windows Updates, with no change.

Finally, a comment on this blog lead me to what appeared to be an answer.  I disabled the World Wide Web (WWW) Publishing Service, and the NPS install completed successfully!

Afterwards, I rebooted the server to verify that both the NPS and WWW services would start, but the NPS service would not start and returned this error:

Text of error: “Windows could not start the Network Policy Server service on Local computer.  Error 0×80072740: Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted.”

After a bit of googling, I discovered that NPS and the Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager (SEPM) do not play nicely together.  This is due to the fact that SEPM also uses radius (port 1812), which conflicts with NPS.  While it is possible to change the port that SEPM uses for radius, I opted to just install NPS on another server, and it has worked just fine since.