Install IIS
Install IIS Tutorials
We'll now show you how to install IIS onto either Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 or higher.
IIS 5.0 is located on the Windows 2000 installation CD, so you'll need access to this CD to install the server.
Have it ready, but don't put it into the CD-ROM drive yet.
1. Go to the control panel (Start | Settings | Control Panel) and select the Add/Remove Programs icon.
The following dialog will appear, displaying a list of your currently installed programs:
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.
2. Locate the Internet Information Services (IIS) entry in the dialog, and note the check box that appears to its left. Unless you installed Windows 2000 Professional via a custom install and specifically requested IIS, it's most likely that the check box will be unchecked (as shown above).
If
you installed Windows 2000 Server, the chances are it is already checked.
a. If the checkbox is cleared, then place a check in the check box and click on Next to install Internet Information Services 5.0. You should 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
b. If the check box is checked then you won't need to install the IIS 5.0 component – it's already present on your machine. Go to Step 3.
3. 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. 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 purposes of this installation, make sure all the check boxes in this dialog are checked; then click on OK
to return to the previous dialog.
Viewing a web page – Request and Response
When you use the Web to view a web page, you will automatically be making contact with a web server. The
process of submitting your URL is called as making a request to the server.
The server interprets the URL, locates the corresponding page, and sends back the page as part of what is called the response to the browser. The browser then takes the code it has received from the web server and compiles a viewable page from it.
The browser is referred to as a client in this interaction, and the whole interaction as a client-server relationship.
Internet Protocols
We won't go through the entire history of the Internet here; the important point is that it is a network of interconnected nodes. The Internet is designed to carry information from one place to another.
It uses a suite of networking protocols (known as TCP/IP) to transfer information
A networking protocol is simply a method of describing information packets so that they can be sent down your telephone-, cable-, or T1-line from node to node, until they reach their intended destination.
One advantage of the TCP/IP protocol is that it can re-route information very quickly if a particular node or route is broken or slow. When the user tells the browser to fetch a web page, the browser parcels up this instruction using a protocol called the Transmission Control Protocol (or TCP).
TCP is a transport protocol, which provides a reliable transmission format for the instruction. It ensures that the entire message is packaged up correctly for transmission
(and also that it is correctly unpacked and put back together after it reaches its destination).
The networking protocol TCP/IP is a method of describing your information packets so that they can be sent down a telephone line, cable, or T1-line from node to node.
Before the parcels of data are sent out across the network, they need to be addressed. So a second protocol called HyperText Transfer Protocol (or HTTP) puts an address label on it, so that TCP/IP knows where to direct the information.
HTTP is the protocol used by the World Wide Web in the transfer of information from one machine to another – when you see a URL prefixed with http://, you know that the internet protocol being used is HTTP.
You can think of TCP/IP as the postal service that does the routing and transfer, while HTTP is the stamp and address on the letter (data) to ensure it gets there.
The message passed from the browser to the web server is known as an HTTP request. When the web server receives this request, it checks its stores to find the appropriate page. If the web server finds the page, it parcels up the HTML contained within (using TCP), addresses these parcels to the browser (using HTTP), and sends them back across the network.
If the web server cannot find the requested page, it issues a page containing an error message (in this case, the dreaded Error 404: Page Not Found) – and it parcels up and dispatches that page to the browser. The message sent from the web server to the browser is called the HTTP response.
