Personal Web Server 

Microsoft Personal Web Server for Windows 95/8 turns any computer running Windows 95/8 into a Web server, enabling you to publish your own personal web pages. With an easy installation setup, once installed PWS simplifies sharing information on corporate Intranets or the Internet.  As it is designed to be small scale, peer-to-peer or act as a small Web server you will need to make some important adjustments to achieve HTML and FTP collaboration are needed.

Installing Personal Web Server

PWS is not installed by default on Windows 98. There is a link to it in the Internet Explorer menu which gives you some details and tells you where the installation program is stored on the Windows 98 CD. It also details the additional utilities that have been bundled with it on Windows 98. After installing PWS, you will need to complete several steps before you are up and running as a server. First of all launch the Personal Web Server control panel and check the following settings.

By default, your home page or default.htm file is located at C:\Webshare\Wwwroot\. If you already have a home page of files that you want to use or build on, place them in this folder and link to them from the existing default.htm page.

Check if your Web Server is up and running, and set the start-up preferences from this panel. If you show the PWS in the icon bar, by right-clicking on the icon in the taskbar you can launch the Administrator, Home Page or properties (control panel).
The Administration tool takes you into web application that lets your administer your Personal Web Server. Each PWS service has a set of options and properties you can set, WWW Administration FTP Administration Local User Administration Explained further down  - follow links

The Services properties let you adjust and modify the setting for HTTP and FTP directories. FTP Startup Options - Auto/Manual FTP Home Root Settings HTTP Startup Options - Auto/Manual Web Server Root Settings Default Home Page Settings

Administration

• WWW Administration

Service - Set Connection Time-out time, the number of Maximum Connections and Password Authentication, which enables you to allow anonymous users or Windows NT Challenge/Response

Directories - Add, Edit and delete form a table generated by the PWS, enable a Default page and allow directory browsing.[sample]

Logging - Allows you to Log your Web server's activity. Specify from Daily, Weekly, Monthly and when the file size reaches X Mbs. You will also need to set the log file directory path.

• FTP Administration

Service - Set Connection Time-Out time and the number of Maximum Connections. A very useful feature is the Show Current Session - if you need to see who was accessing the FTP root at any given time, you can.

Messages - Set your Welcome and Exit messages using this page, you can also set the message for when the maximum number of users has been exceeded.

Directories - Add, Edit and Delete from a table and select between UNIX and MS-DOS listing styles.

Logging - Allows you to Log your FTP servers activity. Specify from Daily, Weekly, Monthly and when the file size reaches X Mb's. You will also need to set the log file directory path.

• Local User Administration

Users - Set Connection Time-out time, the number of Maximum Connections and Password Authentication, which lets you allow anonymous users or Windows NT Challenge/Response.

Groups - Add, Edit and Delete from a table generated by the PWS, enable a Default page and allow directory browsing.[sample]

User/Groups - Allows you to Log your Web server's activity. Specify from Daily, Weekly, Monthly and when the file size reaches X Mbs. You will also need to set the log file directory path.

Windows 98 extra features

As well as the Personal Web Server that accompanies Internet Explorer 4, Windows 98 has a set of extra tools that are not installed by default but are available for installation. They are all extra utilities for web serving, but are really designed for corporate use and few home users will find them of benefit. Corporate users of Windows 98 though will be surprised by what is now possible with these bundled components. The components are:

To install these and Personal Web Server, which is not installed by default, go to the Start menu and go to the Internet Explorer folder. In there you will find a link to an HTML page that will tell you more about the Personal Web Server and the extra utilities. To install the packages, you need to browse through the Explorer to the add-ons\pws\ folder and launch Setup.exe.