You can establish an intranet Web site (a site on your local TCP/IP network) quickly and easily with IIS. All you need to do is copy your content to the default Web site that is created by IIS (without changing IIS default settings). This topic describes how to do this.
As is true for any TCP/IP communication (which includes all intranet and Internet communication), you will need to set up name resolution to allow users to identify your Web site by name instead of the string of numbers that makes up an IP address. For information about name resolution, see the topics under Name Resolution. Also, because you are making your server accessible to others, you should understand the security issues involved; for information, see the topics under Security and also your Windows NT documentation.
If you want to establish an Internet Web site – that is, a site on the World Wide Web instead of on a local intranet – you will need to carry out the steps in this procedure, and also obtain an Internet name and address from an Internet service provider (ISP). For information, see Getting an Internet Name and Address, which is one of the topics under Name Resolution.
To establish an intranet Web site using IIS defaults
- Create a home page for your Web site. There are a number of ways to create a Web page:
- Use Microsoft FrontPage, which includes more than 30 built-in templates and wizards to help you build complex Web pages easily.
- Use other software designed to help you create Web pages. For example, to build fully interactive, dynamic Web content, you can use Microsoft® Visual InterDev™, which includes visual development features and powerful database tools for building intranet and Internet applications.
- Use a text editor to type text and HTML coding. For more information, see Creating a Web Page with a Text Editor.
- Copy the samples provided with IIS, and modify them using your choice of software. The samples are available in the \InetPub\IISSamples directory; if you accepted the defaults in Setup, the InetPub directory is in the root directory of your hard disk. The samples can be viewed through a browser by typing http://computername/samples/, where computername is the name of your server.
- Name the file for your Web page Default.htm. If you want to use another name, you will need to start Internet Service Manager, click the default Web site, click the Properties button on the Toolbar, choose the Documents property sheet, and add the file name to the list of enabled default documents.
- Copy your Web page file into the default home directory for IIS, \IISRoot\Wwwroot. If you accepted the defaults offered in Setup, the \IISRoot directory is \Inetpub\wwwroot.
- Make sure that TCP/IP and name resolution are set up correctly in Windows NT Server. For more information, see your Windows NT documentation and the IIS
topics under Name Resolution.
- Tell your users that they can access your site. To do this, a user starts a browser and types the following:
http://computername/
where computername is the name of your server.
© 1997 by Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.