Taking a Quick Tour

After you've installed IIS, you can take a quick tour of the major components that have been put into place. To do so, first start Internet Explorer, and enter the URL //localhost. Localhost is shorthand for "the IP address of this machine" and will display Internet Explorer's default installation Web page. You will see the default page shown in Figure 13.1. Internet Explorer will also fire up the online documentation for IIS in a separate browser window.

Figure 13.1. IIS serves you a welcome page when first installed. A remote browser, using your real IP address rather than localhost, would see a plain "Under construction" page.

Congratulations! You now have your own Web server. Let's take a look at the built-in pages. If you find them as handy as I did, you might want to add them to your Favorites folder. (You learned how to use Internet Explorer's Favorites folder in Chapter 9, "Browsing the World Wide Web with Internet Explorer.")

Your Web site can be viewed by other users on your home or office network using the URL http://machinename, where machinename is the name you assigned to your computer. On a corporate LAN, your network manager will set up the necessary DNS information so that your computer can be viewed using a URL like the previous one, or using a more standard http://name.domain format. Later in the chapter I'll talk about making the site available to the Internet at large.

If other computer users can't view your Web page, see "Other Computers Can't Reach the SiteReach the Site" in the troubleshooting section at the end of this chapter.

Online Documentation

Typing http://localhost/iishelp in the Address bar displays the IIS Online documentation, which has a built-in search and indexing feature. Check this documentation for the latest IIS news, release notes, and detailed instructions. (This documentation is a good place to spend a couple of hours.)

Printer Manager

If you chose the "Printers virtual directory" when you installed IIS, you now have a nifty Web-based printer management console. When you type http://localhost/Printers in the Address bar, note that your installed printer(s) and any pending print jobs are listed on the page. Other users on your network can view and use your shared printers by entering the URL http://machine/Printers, replacing the word machine with your computer's actual network identification name, its domain name, or its DNS namefor example, judy.mycompany.com/Printers. Because this page uses Windows user-level security, you must view it with Internet Explorer, and you may not be able to manage the printer if you don't have adequate permissions.

If you are viewing this page from a different Windows XP computer or from a Windows 9x or NT 4 computer with the Internet Printing Protocol add-on (it's available from www.windowsupdate.com), you can also select Connect and install this printer as a remote printer. You'll learn about Web printing in Chapter 18, "Windows Unplugged: Remote and Mobile Networking."