Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. Microsoft Personal Web Server
Fire up your very own Web server
It's not widely known that Windows98 and later include a fully functional Web server which you can use to test Web sites that you have developed. Whilst it lacks the full bells and whistles of Microsoft's IIS (Internet Information Server), it does still provide a useful way to try out quite advanced Web sites before putting them live. Users on a small LAN might also want to use it to provide an in-house Intranet for the staff or family. Be careful about using it to serve pages to the Internet though as the security is less than robust and hackers could easily use it to break in to your system with a view to causing mayhem, replacing your Web pages or worse.
Installation
You can check if the Personal Web Server (PWS) is already installed (on Windows 98) by going to the Control Panel, selecting 'Add/Remove Programs' then selecting the Windows Setup tab. Look for 'Internet Tools' then 'Personal Web Server'. If it isn't ticked, tick it and click on OK to install. To run it, select Start/Programs/Accessories/Internet Tools/Personal Web Server/Personal Web Manager. The process is broadly similar for the later versions of Windows.
What Can it Do?
PWS supports FrontPage extensions so you can make use of all the fancy bits that FrontPage offers. Additionally, it can run Active Server Pages (.asp) as well as HTML. For the more advanced Web page designer, ASP is a way of life and PWS provides an excellent environment to learn in. You can also use Jscript and VBScript as well as ActiveX components. You can even make use of database connectivity.
It also provides some limited tools for monitoring the activity on the Web site. This is useful to see how much data is transmitted when people use your site as well as the maximum number of connections that are used. These statistics can be used to help size a production server prior to installation and configuration.
How Do I Use PWS?
Once the Personal Web Manager (PWM) is running, you'll see a screen with five icons down the side called Main, Publish, Web Site, Tour and Advanced. If you select Main you'll see a button marked 'Start'. Click on that to start PWS. At this point you won't see much happening. If you have a Web site ready to test or publish, you can upload it now to the location shown here as 'Your Home Directory'. If you want a really quick test, click on the 'Web Site' icon on the left. This lets you use a wizard to produce a very basic Web site but to be honest, it's not worth bothering with. You'd be much better off using a proper Web page package like FrontPage.
Once you have uploaded your site, you can click on the 'Main' icon and then click on the link to your published Web site just above the start/stop button. This will fire up Internet Explorer and automatically open your Web site. You may get a warning that you are offline but if you do, just click on the retry button and it should load your home page up.
At this point you can look at the PWM to see what the Web server has done so far. Assuming all is well you should see something like this.
The most useful information here is the amount of data served and the maximum number of requests. Here you can spot if a page is producing too much data to quickly load or if it is so complex that the Web browser has had to make multiple connections to load it properly. To the right you can select different ways of viewing the server statistics to see how many requests your site has received.
Publishing
You can publish your Web site in various ways. The PWM includes a Publish icon that provides you with a wizard to publish your site. FrontPage includes a publish option or you could just copy the files to the location shown on the Main page of the PWM.
Advanced
The Advanced icon provides a few functions that may be useful. Most are fairly esoteric and of limited use but you can use this screen to create new Virtual Directories. PWS uses virtual directories to hold the data and pages your site uses. A virtual directory can actually be the name of a real directory or it can be something more interesting. You may have a directory called 'C:\Data' which holds data about sales you wish to publish. Your Web site might be stored on 'D:\IINet\wwwroot'. You can create a virtual directory under D:\IINet\wwwroot which points to C:\Data such that for instance D:\IINet\wwwroot\SalesInfo actually points to C:\Data. You can create as many of these as you want to tie many different locations on your computer together to make them appear to be in a more useful place. The best way to think of virtual directories is as shortcuts much like the ones on your desktop.
Finding Out More
If you want to learn more about PWS and what it can do for you, you'll find the online help provides an excellent overview as well as a very basic ASP tutorial and more. As this information is served up by PWS itself, you need to ensure that you have started it before you select the Help/Personal Web Server Topics menu option.
