canonical / canonical/multipass

Multipass can't bind on the port for listenning after successfull installation on Windows 11 Pro

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Description

**Describe the bug**
Multipass can't bind on the port for listening after successful installation on Windows 11 Pro

**To Reproduce**
It is only reproduced on the several machines of the students
**Expected behavior**
What did you expect to happen?

**Logs**
& "C:\Program Files\Multipass\bin\multipassd.exe" --verbosity debug
...
WARNING: All log messages before absl::InitializeLog() is called are written to STDERR
E0000 00:00:1771579936.622526 12352 chttp2_server.cc:1177] UNKNOWN:No address added out of total 2 resolved for 'localhost:50052' {created_time:"2026-02-20T09:32:16.6225103+00:00", children:[UNKNOWN:Failed to prepare server socket {fd:916, created_time:"2026-02-20T09:32:16.6224115+00:00", children:[UNAVAILABLE:bind: Permission denied (An attempt was made to access a socket in a way forbidden by its access permissions.
-- 10013) {created_time:"2026-02-20T09:32:16.6223602+00:00", grpc_status:14}]}, UNKNOWN:Failed to prepare server socket {created_time:"2026-02-20T09:32:16.6224866+00:00", fd:916, children:[UNAVAILABLE:bind: Permission denied (An attempt was made to access a socket in a way forbidden by its access permissions.
-- 10013) {grpc_status:14, created_time:"2026-02-20T09:32:16.6224853+00:00"}]}]}
error: Failed to start multipass gRPC service at localhost:50052.

**Additional info**
- OS: Windows 11 Pro
- CPU architecture or model: AMD64
- version: 1.15.0

**Additional context**
It seems that the problem is that some components of Windows (Hyper-V) can reserve ports which we can get using:
```powershell
netsh interface ipv4 show excludedportrange protocol=tcp
```
We could start a multipass service listening on a different port.
It could be assumed that to fix this, your installation script should check whether your default port is already reserved and reconfigure the server-side (Windows service) and client (cli) to work on a different port.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start with the multipassd.exe debug command and the localhost:50052 gRPC failure, then compare it with Windows' excluded port ranges from netsh interface ipv4 show excludedportrange protocol=tcp. Done means establishing whether reserved ports cause the startup failure and defining how the Windows service and CLI should coordinate on an alternative port.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
cpp, grpc
Domain
api, backend
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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