Installing Personal Web Server
Did you know that Windows comes with its own version of a web server, the same kind of software that powers every web site you visit?
Microsoft doesn't talk about it too much, but it's present in earlier versions of Windows and it's called Microsoft Personal Web Server (PWS). This means you can set up your own PC as a webserver, serving website content to your own computer, to your office LAN, or even to the world at large!
If you are running NT or Windows 2000 Professional, you won't be able to install PWS, but take heart - you can install Internet Information Server, and it's already on your CD. IIS does the same thing as PWS and a lot more besides. I'll leave the installation of IIS as an exercise for the NT or 2000 reader.
Microsoft unfortunately stopped including PWS with Windows Me, so don't bother looking on that CD. Microsoft even claims it won't work with Me, but it sure does. They just don't want to support it, and they want you to buy 2000 or XP instead.
PWS is available on the Windows 98 CD, but there's a small bug in the installation procedure there that causes trouble if you have a large registry file. See Microsoft's Knowledge Base article Q246081 for details. If you have a slow connection to the Internet, this is likely the best way to do the installation. Follow the instructions in the article.
PWS is also available on the Microsoft website. You can could go to the Microsoft website, search for Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack, and download all umpteen pieces. But don't. I have saved you all the work.
Having gone through the exercise of installing PWS several times, each time trying to remember why it fails, I have finally created a zip file with the complete and fixed Microsoft PWS installation program. There are no pieces in here that are not already available to the public. Unfortunately, it's over 20MBytes in size, so if you don't have a cable connection, you're better off trying to use the Win 98 CD. On a test run with my cable modem, this download took me just under 10 minutes.
Download the convenient and fixed PWS 4.0 installation zip file here.
Once you've downloaded it, unzip the files to a temporary directory and install PWS. You can select typical installation or minimal if you want to save space. You can also accept the default directory of "C:\Inetpub\wwwroot", but I find "C:\web" to be much easier to work with in practice. Leave all the unzipped PWS install files in the temporary directory for the next step.
Once you've installed PWS or IIS, you'll have to reboot before continuing. Then fire up your browser and put in this URL: http://localhost. You should see a big welcome screen corresponding to the initial PWS web page.
If you've made it this far, you're doing great, and the hard stuff is pretty much done. Just a few more tweaks, and you'll be serving up your own perl-based CGI! Continue with
Calling Perl via PWS
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