Networking Week 9

Windows 2003 Default Web Site

This week we looked at enabling the default website in the windows server 2003 edition, this provides what's called an intranet site for local and wide area networks to connect to within the active directory domain.  The process we followed was to of course firstly install server 2003 as described in my earlier posts. The usual services must be included such as Active directory, DHCP, DNS and then Application server (IIS-Internet Information Service). Once these tasks are complete and you navigate to the manage the application server you will find a screen like this picture below.

Once here you can proceed to setup the content of the website you would like others to see on the network you have connected to. To do this you would have a website structured in folders and files possibly on removable media or remote network location and would copy these files into the folder called Inetpub\wwwroot\ this will place the site you are moving to the root of the website accessible via the IP address or computer name followed by any folder name you may like to have for example either

http://192.168.1.100/eddies/

or //eddies-pc/eddies/

while these addresses seem quite different to human's computers can resolve these two addresses as the same with the help of the DNS(domain name server). This will now bring up the website or intranet site that you have created. This site will be accessible over the local network and with some further routing tools such as dynDNS you can also make this site accessible via the Internet.