Windows home server 2011 iis setup

This isbecause I want to cover a lot of things in this one single guide, and then I will write about other configurations and updates in a later post. Introduction and Background I had been working on ways to allow my family to communicate through proper use of their devices, however, every method required a third-party software to communicate. Plus, it required a working internet connection.

If the requirement is just the connectivity and not the Internet-connectivity, I thought why don't I create a server for home that would let us communicate, share items without having to pass it through third-party networks; besides, who trusts them? That was not the main reason, the main reason was that I also enjoyed building a server for the family. In this post, I will walk you guys through building your own web server, you can for sure then update the web application, configure the services as you need!

In this post, I will walk you through the following:. Nothing special here, just installation of Windows Server. I could have used other servers, but then I would have needed to add patches to my applications and so on.

So, instead of this, I would recommend that you just install Windows Server on your machine. You can get an evaluation copy from Microsoft, Try Windows Server Later, just install the Windows Server, I am sure you know how to do that.

Also before you continue, please read the requirements for Windows Server. You can find the explanation and procedures for installing Windows Server online. Learning procedures are also very much simple. Microsoft itself has invested a lot of good resources online for teaching and fine-tuning IT professionals. So you can learn using Windows Server from there too. Configuring the IP address to be used If you have ever been in networking, then you already know that every device has an IP address that is used to communicate with it.

Since, our server will be the hub for our communications. So, we would assign the IP address to our server which we would like to be used throughout the network. To open the configuration window, follow the steps:. First things that you need to understand are the local addresses in the IPv4 range. A private IP address belongs to the local network instead of the external networks such as Internet.

The local IP address ranges are:. So, you can use any of the range from this, and assign this IP to your server. So, according to my own address, network system and addresses. I will set things to the default ones that my ISP provides me with but will select a random IP address from the local range. Figure 1: Configuring the IP address for the server.

Later, we will be using a DNS server to configure how we use the service on our devices and so on. Head on to the next step. In Windows Server, open your Server Manager. Figure 2: Server Manager application in Windows Server. In that,. I typically do a machine restart after installing every component or service.

This is not required all the time however, most of the times you should restart the machine to ensure that the components are installed and are running properly. Figure 3: IIS server main page shown. You can see that this portal now lets you create new sites, connect to applications, configure the server properties, their IP addresses, domains. You can here configure and update the server itself. However, in many cases you will personally have to change the state of the machine and the framework.

I had installed other components related to ASP. NET itself, which may not be visible in your machine at the moment. If everything is similar, great, if not, continue reading as I will also teach you about configuring the ASP.

NET framework on Windows Server. Look to the right panel, it contains everything that you want to do with your application. It contains quick actions such as restarting the application, configuring the application, installing more services from built in galleries and much more.

This application allows you to install the best of the Microsoft products in no time. It scans your machine, checks it for updates, new software package releases and allows you to install them by directly downloading the packages on your machine.

Figure 5: Web Platform Installer can be used to install any software package relative to your machine architecture and operating system. I wanted to talk about this great product by Microsoft, I have really enjoyed it since my days when I was starting learning how to program using WebMatrix.

Setting up ASP. NET components, I suggest you install the maximum of these components. Although, they are not required and only those components are required which you are going to use and which would be required in the production application.

Figure 6: Installation of ASP. NET feature on Windows Server. Select the frameworks that you want to install on your machine. They are required before you can actually publish the stuff on your server.

I selected ASP. NET 4. I had already installed the framework so it turned that to gray in color to show that the selection is disabled. If you want to select any more features that you want, such as Classic ASP by the way, why? This would take some time, depending on many things, such as internet connection, your machine hardware, etc. I suggest you restart the machine, to ensure things are working properly. Now that everything has been set up, we now need to publish an application to our server that we would be using through that IP address that we just assigned to our servers.

Even though this is a personal project, things may get really tough and confusing when you have to publish the changes to the server. So, for that sake, we are going to use Web Deploy tool and we are going to connect our development tools with the server itself.

Setting up Web Deploy Before continuing to the final stages, I wanted to ensure that all of my changes can be pushed to the servers without having to change and update the content myself. Microsoft Web Deploy is one such feature. It allows you to deploy the content remotely, updating the registries, files and other stuff. This is a plain-XML file, used to configure the deployment process of the machines.

Currently, Web Deploy 3. Web Deploy would allow you to publish the changes to your project to your server, hosting environment, in no time! I really love this feature because I have been working on a few updates for my website and Web Deploy proved itself to be very simple, through the procedures like publish profile files where settings are saved in XML, and Visual Studio takes care of connections and publishing. This role would allow your server to be connected through remote devices for publishing purposes.

Figure 7: Windows Deployment Services option shown in gray; third last. Web PI manages most of the dependencies itself. So, if you select a framework or package to be installed, Web PI would itself manage the dependencies that a package requires to be existing on the machine environment.

The final step is to configure the publish profile file. We would be using that file in our development environment to publish the web application. Configuring deployment options Every application requires a different directory, thus every web application would require a different profile to be used while deploying the application to the servers.

I am going to talk about the default ones. Figure 9: Configuring the web deploy publishing option in web application in IIS manager. I own a domain that I would like to use for the server, but the Microsoft wizard only gives the option of transferring the domain to GoDaddy or some other 3rd party host. I own a webhosting and registration company and don't really want to to transfer to a 3rd party, however, my IT staff have no experience with WHS, as we use MS Server on our "real" servers.

I do have direct access to the server info for the domain so my question is, is it possible to manually set up a domain on the WHS system without going through GoDaddy or another 3rd party? If so, what steps would be involved. My apologies for not posting this in a Windows Home Server area, but one does not seem to exist. Thank you, kirk. Join our community to see this answer!

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