I recently had to restart the http service on a server to get some configuation changes active without having to restart the server. This was a Windows Server 2008 R2 server with SQL 2008 and Reporting Services installed. This server has not IIS installed, but is using http.sys to deliver the web pages in Reporting Services.
Anyway, when restarting the http service with
net stop http
I got error message “The http service could not be stopped.” Trying net stop http or net start http only gave error message “The service is starting or stopping. Please try again later.”
I couldn’t find any related process to kill, and was thinking I had to restart the server.
Solution
Just to try it, I stopped the SQL Server Reporting Services Service, and voilá! I could stop the http service.