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No "L". Turns out you have to name the files foo.htm because
(a) that's the default or (b) windows is still too stupid to
deal with four-letter extensions. I really don't care why.
Obviously my next step was to see if I could serve a single web page. Seemed like a fair test, and after only (maybe) 40-50 hours of fooling around, an easy "production" start. As far as I can tell, http is a subset of an Application Server role. Everything is apparently "roles," which seems appropriate. Configure your computer to 'act as if' it were a server. Hmm. Anyway, IIS is the name of the game, so I pressed forward. You may assume there is a bit of fishing around menus and help screens between the various comments you've seen -- I think I've seen all the menu options now, and quite a few of the help screens. Overall, however, the gestalt behind this patchtogether setup still defeats me: I feel as if I'm simply doing things in the hope that something positive might happen. Here are the blow-by-blow notes done in Real Time: "It wants to know if I'd like to incorporate Front Page Extensions or ASP .net stuff. No way! Are you nuts? Besides, the default is "off" and I'm going default as much as possible. This does mean I'm stuck with COM+ and Distributed Transaction Coordinator for now. I'd rather not have them, but there doesn't seem any obvious way to say no, other than ... oh ... debian ... This is fun. It asks for the install CD, which I give it. Then up pops a window asking me what I want to do (I thought I had already told it ...) but proceeds to ignore me and install the components in a background window. Then it tells me I should implement IPSEC and 50 other obscure security measures in the vain hope that I can keep the box from being thoroughly raped as a result of installing this "role." It's not clear to me how many people will be asking for web pages through an IPSEC connection. It also kindly points out that asp.net and frontpage extensions are left off for security reasons. Well duh, I knew that! There follows an incredibly wordy attempt at introducing me to serving static web pages, which I will plow through until I get some useful information on how to turn on the http server. Hold on. This will be its first page. Supposedly the root directory is the curiously named \Inetpub\Wwwroot\ directory. I'll try sticking this document into it and see what happens. Okay, you go to IIS Manager (finding it is only slightly counterintuitive) and follow the instructions. Then the page fails. After a while, you realize this is still doubtless braindead windows, and change the extension from "index.html" to "index.htm" and there you go. Success! Success! Serving the web after only a couple of months! Fussing around through the prefs, I discovered it's default to allow "Scripts" to execute automatically. This might be a bad idea, so I turned it off. Also, there's a fairly simple dialog for setting the document root (root directory of the website) which I just have to change. I'm sure it's a standard kiddie target. Okay, done. That wasn't so bad, was it? |
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Copyright 2003 by David Mark North