IIS was developed by Microsoft and runs only on the Windows Server operating systems (Windows NT, 2000, and XP Professional). Note that it's not available with Windows XP Home Edition. IIS has a built-in capability to run Active Server Pages (ASP) pages, since ASP was created by Microsoft. It can also run PHP pages.

The current version of IIS, which comes with Windows XP Professional, is version 5.1, although version 6.0 is available with the .NET Server Packs.

To install IIS, you'll need to have your Windows operating system (OS) CD available. To start the install, insert the CD into your CD-ROM drive, and the disc should start automatically. You can then select Install Optional Windows Components or similar, and you will be able to select Internet Information Services (IIS), as shown in the following screen shot

Alternatively, if the disc does not start automatically, you can go to the Control Panel, select Add / Remove Programs and Add / Remove Windows Components, and then select IIS. The wording may vary slightly depending on which Windows OS you are using, as will the location of your Windows directory. With Windows NT, the location of the Windows directory is C:\winnt\.

IIS is best installed leaving all options with their default values. Installation is fairly simple and needs very little user interaction.

Note that, once you have a server installed on your machine, it is very important that you make sure you have a firewall installed on your system to stop outsiders from connecting to your web server and potentially trying to hack into it. Many hackers scan for servers on home machines, as they are often fairly unprotected. It's also a good idea to keep your server up-to-date with all the latest patches from Microsoft (see http://www.microsoft.com/security/), so it behaves exactly like a production server would.

There are many firewalls available such as Norton Personal Firewall from Symantec (http://www.symantec.com) or Black Ice from ISS (http://blackice.iss.net/index.php). The firewall should be set up to disallow connections to your web server from outside your computer or network.

Checking the Installation

Once you have installed IIS, the next step is to check that the installation has worked successfully. Open up a new browser window, and in the address bar enter either

http://localhost/localstart.asp

or

http://computername/localstart.asp

Both localhost and computername refer to the computer that IIS is running on. Note that computername is the name assigned to your Windows system, which you can find by selecting the System option in the Windows Control Panel. When you enter one of these addresses, you should see the default IIS page, which is shown below:

Administering a Basic Web Site

To administer your web site once IIS is installed, you need to use the Internet Information Services section of the Microsoft Management Console (MMC). To start the console, select Internet Information Services from Administrative Tools in your Windows Start menu. Otherwise, it can be opened from the Windows Control Panel. Once it opens, you can expand the tree on the left side to look something like the following screen shot (it will vary depending upon your setup).

With most versions of IIS that come with Windows, you can only host one web site at a time. This is called the default web site and it can be browsed using the address http://localhost/.

However, as it's a development server you're setting up, you can easily get around the "one web site" rule by creating new directories under the default web site directory, storing a different web site in each directory. You can then browse each web site using the address http://localhost/directoryname/.

On the right side of the menu bar in the preceding screen shot, you can see three icons that allow you to control the web server:

• A play icon – This starts the web server, making the site live.

• A stop icon – This stops the web server, taking the site offline.

• A pause icon – This allows the web server to continue serving existing connections, while not accepting any new connections.

On the right side of the console itself, you'll see the directories and files that make up your web site. After a normal IIS install, there will be a number of files installed here, which are for the default IIS web site and help files.

The Home Directory

The home directory is a directory on your hard disk from which web pages are served. Usually, when you install IIS, the default home directory is set to C:\Inetpub\wwwroot.

All files that are placed in this directory are available through a browser, so creating your own web site is as simple as copying your web pages and images into this directory. The path to the home directory can be to a local directory on the PC or a shared folder on another computer in the network. You can change this directory if you wish, so that you can leave the default IIS files in C:\Inetpub\wwwroot and start with a fresh directory for your new web site.

Changing the Web Site Settings

Right-click Default Web Site in the IIS console and select Properties. A new dialog box will appear, allowing you to change a number of settings related to the web site. There are many tabs on this dialog box, but most are for advanced uses on a production web server, so there are only a few we need to look at here.

Web Site

Under this tab, you can set the following options:

• IP Address – If you are unsure of your computer's IP address, you can leave this set to the default option of All Unassigned. Alternatively, if your computer has a local network IP address (for example, 192.168.0.1), you can enter it here.

• TCP Port – This is the port that the web server runs on. The standard value for this is 80. If you change the port number (for example, to port 81), you'll need to specify the new port number in the address bar when you call up a web page (for example, http://localhost:81/).

• You can also set a connection time-out value, which tells IIS how long to keep an idle connection open before it's closed, and the format in which IIS stores its web logs. These options are best left to the default settings.

Home Directory

The home directory is where the files for your web site are located. Under this tab, you can change the default home directory from C:\Inetpub\wwwroot to another directory of your choice. This can be a directory on the server machine or another machine on your network. You can also specify whether Directory Browsing is allowed.

This means that if there is no default page found for a directory, the files in the directory are listed instead. This is a security risk on a production server and should be turned off, but on a development server it's often useful to leave the option on to allow you to easily select pages when you're testing the site.

The Configuration button is used to tell IIS the program that processes each different file extension—for example, the .asp or .php extensions. We'll look at this in more detail in the section about installing PHP into IIS.

Documents

The Documents tab allows you to set which web pages are loaded by default if no page is requested in the URL.

For example, if someone types the address http://www.yoursite.com/, your server would actually serve that user http://www.yoursite.com/index.htm or whichever file is specified as a default page. The list box allows you to specify which page names should be searched for in such situations, with the order of priority from top to bottom in the list.

In this section, you can also specify an HTML file that will be automatically added to the bottom of every page of your web site (for example, to display a copyright notice).

Checking That Web Pages Are Being Served Correctly

Now that you've looked at basic web site administration, you can check that the server can serve both HTML and ASP pages properly. Make sure that the web server is running by checking the IIS console first.

Checking HTML Pages

Create a new HTML page in Dreamweaver MX, and add a test message to be displayed if the server is serving documents properly. Save the file as htmltest.htm in the home directory for your web site (remember, the default is C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\htmltest.htm).

Now open a browser and go to http://localhost/htmltest.htm. If your message is displayed correctly, you can move on and check that the ASP pages are working.

If your page doesn't appear, check that the web server is actually running and that the directory in which you saved htmltest.htm is actually the home directory for your web site.

Checking ASP Pages

To check that ASP pages are running on your IIS installation, create a new page and add the following ASP code to the page body:

  
	    
	    
	    
	    
	   
	  <% ="ASP Pages are working
" %>  
	  <% =("Your IP address is: " + Request.ServerVariables("REMOTE_ADDR") %>  
	    
	    

Save this page as asptest.asp in your web site's home directory, and then open a browser and navigate to http://localhost/asptest.asp. When the page opens, it should display something similar to the following:

ASP Pages are working

Your IP Address is: 127.0.0.1

Again, if the page doesn't appear, check that it's saved in the web site's home directory and that the web server is running. The IP address 127.0.0.1 corresponds to your own computer and is the IP address equivalent of the hostname localhost. If you assigned an IP address in the IIS setup as a local network address (for example, 192.168.0.1), it will be shown here instead of 127.0.0.1.

Using an Access Database with ASP

If you want to use a Microsoft Access database with ASP, you'll need to have Microsoft Access installed on the server, or you can use the appropriate Microsoft MDAC and Jet files. These are available to download from http://www.microsoft.com/data/.

You can then set up a Data Source Name (DSN), which is a database connection that ASP uses to communicate with the Access database, unless you will be using DSN-less connections in your ASP code. A DSN is a connection between your ASP code and the database that allows your code to work with the data stored in the database.

Open the Windows Control Panel and select Data Sources (ODBC). In the dialog box that opens, select the System DSN tab and click the Add button. From the list of data sources that appears, select Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb) and then click Finish. A dialog box similar to the following will appear:

You can then enter the name of the DSN in the Data Source Name box. The DSN can be called anything you choose, but it cannot be the same as any others already set up on the server. A good idea is to name the DSN after your database, so that it's easy to see which database the DSN works with. You cannot have any spaces in the DSN name.

Next, click the Select… button to select the database that the DSN is used to connect to. The database is normally located in a directory outside your web root directory so that it cannot be accessed over the Internet, only by your code on the server for security reasons. Click OK to create this DSN, which you can then use in Dreamweaver MX to connect to the database

When you come to transfer the web site from your development server to the production server, you just need to create a DSN with the same name on the new server so that no changes are required in your code.

Troubleshooting IIS Install Problems

A detailed manual for IIS administration is copied to your server when you install IIS. You can view this manual by browsing to http://localhost/iishelp/iis/misc/default.asp. It's a good idea to read through this if you have not previously worked with IIS.

If you have problems installing or setting up IIS, you can get more information about IIS from the Help menu of the IIS console.

It's also worth taking a look at the IIS section of the Microsoft TechNet site, at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/prodtechnol/iis/support/IISTopKB.asp. This site contains the IIS Knowledge Base and a large number of articles that will help you troubleshoot any difficulties.

Another good web site for IIS information is IISFAQ.com, located at http://www.iisfaq.com/, which also has a large amount of helpful information and links to other IIS-related sites.

It's extremely likely that you're not the first person to have a specific problem, so it's well worth doing a search on the Internet for more information. An excellent source for information is the Usenet newsgroups, which can be easily searched on the Web using Google Groups at http://groups.google.com/. It's very likely that you'll find that someone else has posted the same problem you're encountering, along with a solution. It's a good idea to search for the specific error message or number that occurs, as that will take you directly to information about the specific error.