Q: Debian GCE VM can't start a server on port 8080 I can't seem to bind a webserver to port 8080 on a Debian GCE VM instance, I always get :
error is[SocketException: Failed to create server socket (OS Error: Cannot assign requested address.

I've added a firewall entry for 0.0.0.0/0 tcp:8080, not that it seems to make a difference to the fault. I have a CouchDb database running on the same box on port 5984 with no problems.
The same code runs fine on an Ubuntu box I have.

A: Looks like there is another server on this host listening to port 8080.
It is not related to configuration of your firewall
Can you run a command
netstat -na 
and check if contains a line like
TCP    0.0.0.0:8080           0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING
