Establishing a Connection with a Customer's Computer

A potential customer opens a sign-up program that starts Internet Explorer, dials the ISS, and posts an initial CGI request. The ISS then does the following:

• Accepts the CGI request from the customer's desktop computer (the HTTP client).
• Creates a local data store for accumulating the information that the customer enters.
• Assigns a unique session handle that is embedded in all subsequent HTTP transactions with the client.

HTTP is a session-less protocol; however, the ISS operates in a session-oriented mode, using the session handle to identify all transactions associated with the sign-up process for a particular customer. For example, the session handle could be an automatically generated sequence number assigned to this transaction by your database system.

To install the server

1. Install Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 and include the TCP/IP and Microsoft Internet Information Server 3.0 options. For additional information about installing Windows NT 4.0, see the Windows NT Server Resource Kit.
2. Install Remote Access Service (RAS). You can use Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) to assign IP addresses automatically or set up a range of static IP addresses. You must enable user accounts for dial-up and set up RAS to receive calls.
3. When installing RAS, you must enable user accounts for dial-up and to receive calls.

Note

• If there is no name resolution available when users dial up, then they must use the IP address to access the IIS server.

To create a guest account

1. Start the User Manager utility and use it to set the default Guest account password to None (that is, no password).
2. Start the Remote Access Administrator utility.
3. On the Users menu, click Permissions, and then enable the Guest account for dial-in permission.

To modify the Acc2.ins file

The following entries are generally required for all users and must be added manually to the .ins file. Be sure to review these entries carefully, because no error checking is provided.

Note

The following entries are user-specific and can be added to the .ins file (except for the Outlook Express entries, which are necessary only if Outlook Express features are provided by the service). The mechanism for placing these entries dynamically in the file varies based on the services available on your server. Usually, user input is required at sign-up. Most servers support some macro mechanism associated with CGI that makes the process easy.

For Windows 3.1, all Outlook Express entries must be set or none of the settings will be used.

If users are assigned to different servers, the following entries need to be changed to replace the information entered into the wizard.