Configuring IIS 5

IIS 5 (Internet Information Services) is a Windows 2000-based Web server for publishing Web pages and sharing documents over the Internet or the intranet. Included are HTTP, FTP, SMTP, and NNTP servers. Let's see how to use it.

Instal IIS 5

IIS 5 comes with Windows 2000 and can be installed at the time of Windows 2000 installation by clicking the check box 'Enable IIS' in Windows 2000 components. You can install it or add additional components later, from Control Panel>Add/Remove programs>Add/Remove Windows Components.

Now, go to Start>Programs> Administrative Tools. Start the Internet Services Manager to start publishing your sites. You can either use the default HTTP and FTP websites here or create your 

own sites.

Create sites

Before using the Site Creation wizard to publish your site, create the contents of your site using any Web authoring tool and save it in the default web publishing
directory–\inetpub\ wwwroot–of IIS.

Now open the Internet Services Manager and right-click the name of your server and select New>website. The site-creation wizard prompts you to enter a site description, the IP address and port number of your machine (default is 80). An option called host header here is used to add multiple sites on to a single server, using the same IP address and port number. We'll cover this later.

Next enter the path to your home directory and access permissions–read, run scripts, execute, write, and browse–for your website. You'll now see your website listed under the Internet Information Services node in the left-hand panel of the Internet Services Manager.

If your home page has a name other than default.asp or default.htm, you have to add it to the default documents in IIS. Right-click your site name and select properties from the menu. Go to the Documents tab and click on the Add button. Now type the name of your default home page in the Add default document box and click Up arrow key to make it the first document. You can type in your machine name or IP address in your browser to see your site.

The process of creating an FTP site is similar. Select New>FTP site to start the FTP Site Creation wizard. The default FTP directory is
\inetpub\ftproot.

You can set the maximum number of concurrent connections to your FTP site by right-clicking your site name and selecting Properties>FTP site> Connections. To enter messages for welcome, exit and for the maximum number of connections reached, right-click your site name and select Properties>Messages. You can also set a user name and password for accessing
your site.

Host multiple sites

So far, we have created and published a simple FTP and HTTP site. We'll now host multiple sites on to a single server. There are basically three ways of doing this. You can bind multiple IP addresses to your network card, use the same IP address but different port numbers for different sites or use the Host Header name option.

Use multiple IP addresses

If you have free IP addresses, then you can bind these to your network card or you can add additional network cards. To bind multiple IP addresses to a network card, right-click My Network Places and select Properties. The Network and Dial-up connections folder opens up. Right-click Local area connection and select Properties. Select TCP/IP from the window, click on Properties, and click on the Advanced button. Now in the IP settings box, click the Add button and enter the additional IP address and Subnet mask here (Note that the add button will not be active if your server gets its IP address from a DHCP server). The IP addresses associated with the network card will be displayed in the Site creation wizard. So you can select different IP addresses for different sites at the time of site creation. To associate a domain name to the IP address, you'd need to configure your
DNS server.

Use different port numbers

If you don't have multiple IP addresses, you can change the port number for each site. Users will have to specify this port number along with the URL in their browser. This is usual for sites used only by a limited number of people, say the Web front end for the companies e-mail server.

Host header names

If you want to host multiple sites using a single IP address and port number, then you can make use of this option. You add host header names to different sites at the time of creating a site. For example, one site could be labs.pcquest.com and another mail. pcquest.com. You’ll have to create a new domain in the DNS for each host header name.

For this, open the DNS manager and select your parent domain. Right-click and select New domain. Type the new domain name here. Now select the domain name you just created. Right-click and select New host and . type the IP address of your machine here. Typing http://labs.pcquest.com in the browser will open the site.

Virtual directories

If all your directories are not located in the Web root directory on the IIS server or are located on some other drive, you can still link it to your websites using virtual
directories.

To create one in the Internet Services Manager, select the website or FTP site to which you want to add it to. Right-click and select New>Virtual directory. You'll come across the New Virtual Directory Wizard. Type an alias name, say test, which will enable you to access your virtual directory. Now enter the path where your physical directory is located and grant the appropriate access permissions. For example in http://pcquest.com/labs pcquest.com is your domain name and test is the alias name of your virtual directory. To link the virtual directory from another page, you'll have to specify http://pcquest.com/labs as the hyperlink in your web page.

WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning)

WebDAV is an Internet standard that lets you share files located on the Web server from desktop machines. To setup a WebDAV directory, first create a physical folder in C:\inetpub directory. Now create a virtual directory in the Internet Service Manager and give WebDAV as the alias name. Link this to the physical directory and grant access rights. Your WebDAV directory is ready. Now connect to this directory from your client machines. There are three ways of doing so. You can either fire up Internet Explorer and enter the URL to the WebDAV folder, such as http://pcquest.com/WebDAV. Or if you are using a Windows 2000 machine, you can connect to the WebDAV folder using the Add Network Place wizard.

You'll need to enter the path to your Web folder here to create a shortcut to the Web folder in My Network Places. You can also use Office 2000 to write or publish directly to the WebDAV directory. To do so, first create your application in Office 2000. Go to File>Save as and select My Network places and the shortcut to the Web folder.

Neelima Vaid