Magoo's Wise Words
IIS Webserver Guide

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Installing IIS

The first step is to install the IIS service. IIS comes free with Windows XP Professional and Windows 2003 Server. If you don't have one of those operating systems, you should consider installing Apache HTTP Server instead. To install IIS, open up your control panel and click on "Add/Remove programs." On the left side, click on "Add/Remove Windows Components." Check the box next to "Internet Information Service" and click the details button.

Make sure that at least the Common Files, Internet Information Services Snap-In, and the World Wide Web Service are selected. You may also find the Documentation useful at some point, and it only takes up 3.5 MB, so I would install that too. Click on "OK" and then "Next" and it will walk you through installing IIS. You will most likely need your Windows XP disk.

Configure IIS

Ok, now that we have IIS on the computer, the next step is to configure it. Open up your control panel again and double click on "Administrative Options." Double click on "Internet Information Services." On the right side, double click on your computer and then double click the folder that is there.

Basic Settings

Now, you should see something like "Default Web Site - Stopped." It's a good general rule to leave is stopped when you don't need it because it consumes system resources and presents some security risks. For now, we want it on. Right click it and then choose "Start." Now, right click it and choose "Properties."

On the "Web Site" tab, you can name your site. The name here is mostly for aesthetics, it won't change how your site works. You may want to change the IP address from "All" to your IP address (again, mostly for security.) You can also set an alternate port to use for serving your web page here, but port 80 is probably what you want.

On the "Home Directory" tab, set the local folder on your computer that you keep your web page in. You can also set the permissions you want to give visitors. Everyone will need at least "Read" privleges to see your pages.

On the "Documents" tab, make sure that the name of your homepage is listed there. Usually, you need to have index.html or index.htm in there. For my site, I need index.php since I use PHP scripts on my homepage.

Security Settings

Our next stop is the "Directory Security" tab. This determins who is allowed to see your web page. If you are running a public server, you want to leave these pretty liberal. If you are just running a test server, you might want to lock this down.

On Windows XP, I don't think you can access the "IP address and domain name restrictions." So, what we do need to do instead is click on "Edit" under "Anonymous access and authentication control." Here's where we can keep people out of our server if we want to just run a testing server. You can disable anonymous access by simply unchecking the box at the top. Then, choose "Basic authentication" at the bottom. This will allow you to limit access to your web page to only the people that know your Windows username and password (hopefully just you.)

Remember that for this to work, you account has to have a password on it. Your other option, if you aren't too worried about who has access to your testing website, is to just allow anonymous access. Sometimes it will ask you for a password anyway if you allow IIS to control the password. I got around that by creating a dummy user and assigning the password myself.

If you are running a public server, you probably will need to allow anynonmous access. The other option is to run a semi-private server. You could set a password and then give that password to any you want to be able to see your web site. That might be handy if you are running a BitTorrent server just for your friends or something where you want to control access.

Final Settings

Our final stop is the "HTTP Headers" tab. Here, we should set the time for content to expire. When someone reads your webpage, their web browser downloads a copy of the page to their computer so it can be displayed on their screen. Their computer may keep that copy for a few days or even a few weeks. If that same person wants to view your page again, their web browser will contact your server to see if it needs to download an updated version of the page. This setting tell your server how often to make readers download updated versions.

If you are running a testing server, you probably want to set this to immediatly. That will allow you to see the changes you make to your pages quicker. If you are running a public server, you may want to set this to a longer time to reduce the load on your server.

Now, click on "OK" at the bottom to get out of here. It will tell you that some other things are going to be affected by the changes you just made. Just tell it you are OK with that and close out of everything.

Next =>[Magoo's WinXP Webserver Tutorial - Page 3, Installing MySQL and PHP]