Personal Web Server 4.0 is a free ASP capable webserver for your Win95/98 or NT Workstation PC. It’s a reduced version of Microsoft’s fullblown webserver IIS 4.0 (Internet Information Server) that is used on machines running Win NT Server. PWS is available as a free download from Microsoft, as a part of the NT Option Pack. In this lesson you will learn to download & install PWS, and get your first ASP pages running. There are differences between PWS for NT Workstation and PWS for Win95/98. Microsoft describes PWS for NT Workstation like this: "Full-featured site development or personal publishing on a corporate intranet" and PWS for Win95/98 like " Personal publishing on a low-volume corporate intranet". One example is that you don’t have an FTP service in the Win95/98 version of PWS. In this article we will focus on the Win95/98 version.
Download
To run PWS you need IE 4.01 or later. Make sure you have downloaded and installed IE before you
site. The download is pretty big (31MB for a full install), so you should be sitting on a fast internet connection (or buy a good book to read :-) ). An alternative is to buy a magazine with a CD-ROM containing NT Option Pack (take a look in your local news store).
The download wizard is pretty straight forward, and you shouldn’t have any problems downloading PWS. Make sure that you choose the download site that is closest to you to make sure you get a fast download. If the download seems slow (e.g. under 2-3K/sec. on a standard 33.6 modem), you should cancel the download and try a differnet download site. If this doesn’t help try downloading in of peak hours (e.g. early in the morning).
Installation
Go to the folder you specified in the download wizard, and run SETUP.EXE
If you don’t have Winsock 2.0 it will be automatically installed. Next you will be asked
which components you want to install, just choose Typical (Or try custom if you are a control freak like me :-) ). The rest should be a piece of cake. Reboot and the PWS installation are done!
Your first ASP site
Now it’s time to get started. To check if things are OK, start up your browser. Type in this URL:
http://yourmachinename (where yourmachinename is the name of your computer on the network. If it doesn’t work, or if you don’t know the network name of your computer use this address in stead: http://127.0.0.1/). You should now get the PWS 4.0 welcome page. But let’s make our own, and check that ASP is enabled. Open a texteditor like Notepad, and cut’n past the below code in to it:
<HTML>
<BODY>
<B>Welcome to my webpage hosted on PWS!</B><BR>
The time is now: <%=TIME%><BR>
</BODY>
</HTML>
Save the textfile in the INETPUB/WWWROOT/ directory on your machine and name it DEFAULT.ASP. Try accessing your website again (Type in the address again, and hit enter). The text: Welcome to my webpage hosted on PWS! should now show up. On the line under you should read "The time is now:" followed by the current time. If the time is showing up correctly you have a working ASP server running on your PC! (Run out and brag about it to all your colleagues/friends!).
No that wasn’t so hard no was it?
No you can try making your own ASP pages and place them in the INETPUB/WWWROOT/ directory. If you don’t specify a page name in the URL, then the page named default.asp will show up.
For more info on PWS 4.0 and troubleshooting tricks go to the START menu Programs/Microsoft Personal Web Server/Release Notes.
