Turning Windows 7 into a Web Server : Accessing Your Website

http://127.0.0.1/
http://localhost/
http://IPAddress/ (replace IPAddress with the IP address of the computer)
http://ComputerName/ (replace ComputerName with name of the computer)

Figure 28.2 shows the home page of the default IIS website that appears.

Figure 1. The default IIS 7.5 website home page.

Creating a Windows Firewall Exception for the Web Server

As things stand now, your new website will only work properly when you access it using a web browser running on the Windows 7 PC that’s running IIS. If you try to access the site on any other computer (or from a location outside your network), you get an error message, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Other computers on your network can’t access your web server.

The problem is that the Windows Firewall on the Windows 7 machine hasn’t been configured to allow data traffic through the World Wide Web Services used by IIS. For your website to work from any remote location, you need to set up an exception for the World Wide Web Services in Windows Firewall. Here are the steps to follow:

1.	Select Start, type firewall, and then click Allow a Program through Windows Firewall in the search results. The Allowed Programs window appears.
2.	Click Change Settings to enable the window controls.
3.	Click to activate the check box beside the World Wide Web Services (HTTP) item, as shown in Figure 3. Figure 3. You need to configure Windows Firewall on the Windows 7 machine running IIS to allow traffic over the World Wide Web Services. Note HTTP is short for Hypertext Transport Protocol, the protocol used to exchange information on the World Wide Web.
4.	Click OK to put the exception into effect.

Accessing Your Website over the Network

With the Windows Firewall exception for the World Wide Web Services in place, you can now access the website from any remote computer on your network. You do this by launching your web browser and entering one of the following addresses:

http://IPAddress/ (replace IPAddress with the IP address of the IIS computer)
http://ComputerName/ (replace ComputerName with name of the IIS computer)

					  

For example, Figure 4 shows Internet Explorer accessing the same IP address as shown earlier in Figure 2, but now instead of an error the user sees the default IIS site.

Figure 4. With the firewall exception in place, other computers on your network can now access your Web server.

Accessing Your Website over the Internet

People on your network can now access your website, but you may also want to allow website access to people from outside your network (that is, from the Internet). To set this up, you must do three things:

An Internet user can now access your website by entering the following addresses into a web browser:

http://IPAddress/ (replace IPAddress with your router's external IP address)
http://DomainName/ (replace DomainName with your Dynamic DNS domain name)			 

I set up a DDNS service to map the domain paulmcfedries.com
 to my local network, and then configured my router to forward web 
traffic to my Windows 7 machine running IIS. As you can see in Figure 5, entering the address http://www.paulmcfedries.com/ brings up the default IIS website.

Figure 5. With dynamic DNS and port forwarding in place, Internet users can access your Windows 7 web server using your domain name.