Installing Internet Information Services 5.0

Now it's time to get your web server up and functioning. Since this book is geared towards users of Windows 2000, we'll walk through the steps for locating IIS 5.0, and (if necessary) installing it. If your web server machine has an older Microsoft system or another operating system, you'll need to consult the relevant documentation. Appendix E will be of interest to users of Windows 95/98/NT Workstation. For Windows XP users and Windows Vista please see these updated directions for installing IIS 6 or 7 .

Let's press on with Windows 2000 and IIS 5.0. You might not have to do much in this initial stage, if you discover that you're already running IIS 5.0. We'll look at how to check that right now.

1.    Go to the control panel (Start | Settings | Control Panel) and select the Add/Remove Programs icon. The following dialog will appear, display a list of your currently installed programs:

2.    Select the Add/Remove Windows Components icon on the left side of the dialog, to get to the screen that allows you to install new windows components.

3.    Locate the Internet Information Services (IIS) entry in the dialog, and note the checkbox that appears to its left. Unless you installed Windows 2000 via a custom install and specifically requested IIS, it's most likely that the checkbox will be unchecked (as shown above).

4.a  If the checkbox is cleared, then place a check in the checkbox and click on Next to load Internet Information Services 5.0 and Active Server Pages. You might be prompted to place your Windows 2000 installation disk into your CD-ROM drive. It will take a few minutes to complete. Then go to Step 5.

4.b  If the checkbox is checked then you won't need to install the IIS 5.0 component – it's already present on your machine. Go to Step 5.

5.    Click on the Details button – this will take you to the dialog shown below. There are a few options here, for the installation of various optional bits of functionality. For example, if the World Wide Web Server option is checked then our IIS installation will be able to serve and manage web pages and applications. If you're planning to use FrontPage 2000 or Visual InterDev to write your web page code, then you'll need to ensure that the FrontPage 2000 Server Extensions checkbox is checked. The Internet Information Server Snap-In is very desirable, as you'll see later in the chapter – so ensure that is checked too.

For the purpose of this installation, make sure all the checkboxes in this dialog are checked; then click on OK to return to the previous dialog.

How It Works

Web Services start up automatically as soon as your installation is complete, and thereafter whenever you boot up Windows – so you don't need to run any further startup programs, or click on any short-cuts as you would to start up Word or Excel.

IIS installs most of its bits and pieces on your hard drive, under the \WinNT\system32\inetsrv directory; however, more interesting to us at the moment is the \InetPub directory that is also created at this time. This directory contains subdirectories that will provide the home for the web page files that we create.

If you expand the InetPub directory, you'll find that it contains several subdirectories:

• \iissamples\homepage contains some example ASP pages.
• \iissamples\sdk contains as set of subdirectories that hold ASP scripts which demonstrate the various ASP objects and components.
• \scripts is an empty directory, which is a useful place to store any ASP scripts you might create.
• \webpub is also empty. This is a 'special' virtual directory, used for publishing files via the Publish wizard. Note that this directory only exists if you are using Windows 2000 Professional Edition.
• \wwwroot is the top of the tree for your web site (or web sites). This should be your default web directory. It also contains a number of subdirectories, which contain various bits and pieces of IIS. This directory is generally used to contain subdirectories which hold the pages that make up our web site – although, in fact, there's no reason why you can't store your pages elsewhere. We'll be discussing the relationship between physical and virtual directories later in this chapter.
• \ftproot, \mailroot and \nntproot should form the top of the tree for any sites that use FTP, mail or news services, if installed.