IDEA / HandBrake / WSL Port Conflict

Recently I upgraded HandBrake to the latest version, however, it stopped working. The root cause is TCP port conflict. As usual, I ran net stop winnat && net start winnat and it worked. But, that broke WSL network.

I didn't want to reset the winnat every time I started Windows with a broken WSL. Finally, I found the root cause: Hyper-V reserves huge amount of TCP ports after Windows is up. The fix is to tell Hyper-V to avoid those commonly used TCP ports.

The following command can show you the excluded TCP port ranges.

> netsh int ipv4 show excludedportrange protocol=tcp

Protocol tcp Port Exclusion Ranges

Start Port    End Port
----------    --------
        80          80
      1000        1010
      1020        1030
      ......

As you can see, huge amount of TCP ports are reserved by Hyper-V. So, let's tell Hyper-V not to be that greedy by executing the following command.

> netsh int ipv4 set dynamic tcp start=49152 num=16384

That command tells Windows to allow dynamic TCP ports from 49152 so that Hyper-V is only able to reserve TCP ports starting from 49152. The following command can verify the setting is correct.

> netsh int ipv4 show dynamic protocol=tcp

Protocol tcp Dynamic Port Range
---------------------------------
Start Port      : 49152
Number of Ports : 16384

Once the new dynamic TCP port range is set, just reboot your machine and everything goes back to normal. IDEA can start smoothly, WSL network is always on, HandBrake works all the time.