Managing Your Site with the Computer Management Console


If you want detailed control over access rights in your Web folders, or you have installed the FTP or SMTP services, you should take a look at the Internet Information Services management plug-in. There are three ways to get to it:

  • Click Start, right-click My Computer, and select Manage. Under Services and Applications, select Internet Information Services.

  • Open Control Panel and select Performance and Maintenance, Administrative Tools, Internet Information Services.

  • If you've customized your Start menu so it displays Administrative Tools, just click Start, All Programs, Administrative Tools, Internet Information Services.

Open the Internet Information Services item, and then the entry for your computer, and under this you'll see entries for the specific services you installed: Web Sites, FTP Sites, if you installed the FTP service, and Default SMTP Virtual Server, if you installed the SMTP service. Figure 13.2 shows the manager window with all three services installed.

Figure 13.2. The Computer Management console contains management tools for the FTP server, Web server, and SMTP server.


In this Explorer-like view of the IIS components, you can take complete control of IIS's behavior, down to its treatment of individual files. To get a feel of what is possible, you should look at the Web server's configuration settings. To view them, right-click the Default Web Site entry in the left pane and select Properties. You then are presented with a complex dialog box with eight tabs (see Figure 13.3).

Figure 13.3. On the Default Web Site Properties dialog box, you can control the behavior of the Web server.


As I said earlier, IIS is a complicated program and there are many settings. In my experience, you'll only need to consider a few of them, and it's quite likely that you won't need to make any changes at all. I'll go through some of the more important settings in Table 13.1.

Table 13.1. IIS Web Site Configuration Settings

Tab

Setting

Value

Web Site

Enable

Lets you keep a record of all Web site visits. I'll discuss Logging this later in the chapter.

 

TCP Port

You can change the TCP Port of your Web site from the usual 80 to another value; this is usually only done if you host several different Web servers. 8080 is a common alternate port number.

Home Directory

Local Path

Sets the home or "starting point" directory for the folders displayed on your Web site. The home directory should be on a disk partition formatted with NTFS. You'll only need to change this if the default folder is on a drive using FAT formatting and you can't update the drive.

Documents

Default Document

Lets you select the names IIS tries when looking for a "default document" to return for a URL that names a folder but not a specific document.

HTTP Headers

File Types

Lets you specify MIME Types for file types not already registered with Windows.

Server Extensions

Settings

Specifies email address and server information for email sent by the FrontPage extensions and scripts.


If you plan to use the FrontPage Server extensions to process forms, or if you plan to send email from forms or scripts, you'll need to make the following settings:

1.

Select the Server Extensions tab, and under Performance, select the approximate number of pages you expect to have on your Web site: fewer than 100; 100 to 1,000; or more than 1,000.

2.

If you plan to use form and email processing with ASP scripts, FrontPage Extensions, and/or Mailing List services with the Office Server Extensions, select Specify How Mail Should Be Sent Settings, and make the following entries:

Web server's mail address: Enter the email address that you want mail sent by your Web site (such as responses from forms) to appear to come from. I use something like "webmaster@mydomain.com"; you'd want to use your own email address.

Contact address: Enter the email address that people should use to report trouble with your Web site. This will appear on error message Web pages generated by Front Page. I use "webmaster@mydomain.com" for this also.

SMTP Mail Server: This is the mail server that will process your outgoing mail. Enter the name of your network's or your ISP's SMTP mail receiver, often something like smtp.myisp.com. If you've installed the SMTP Mail component, you can enter localhost here.

3.

Click OK to close the dialog box.

You also can manage the settings for specific folders listed under the Default Web Site entry, by right-clicking them and choosing Properties. On the Documents tab, you can specify that a given document or folder is to be obtained from a different URL on a different Web server, using a process called redirection. Complex CGI programs called ASP applications are configured here as well.



Special Edition Using Microsoft Windows XP Professional
Special Edition Using Microsoft Windows XP Professional (3rd Edition)
ISBN: 0789732807
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 450

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net