Microsoft's Free Web Server is Ducky (2/26/96)

by David Strom

Microsoft has borrowed a page from Netscape's playbook and decided to offer for free its Internet Information Server, a combination web/gopher/ftp server. You can download the software from the web, or you can purchase a variety of Microsoft products that include IIS, or you can buy the disks directly from Microsoft for $99.

And if you do decide to download realize that you'll need a fast line, some patience, or both: at 3 megabytes for the IIS software and another 8 for Service Pack 3 (which is needed to get IIS to run), that is a lot of downloading.

The good news is that IIS has just enough features to get your web feet wet, including support for the Secure Sockets Layer encyption routines. The bad news is that if you want to get really serious about the web, you'll outgrow the software and might be better off with O'Reilly's WebSite or a Unix web server. Missing features include both the ability to support proxy servers and any search tools such as the WebFind tool that comes with WebSite. Of course, neither of those products offers gopher or ftp servers like IIS.

Documentation provided with IIS is relatively straightforward, although for the most part you can get up and running without it. One chapter worth reading concerns securing your site against intruders, which is a good overview of NT and TCP/IP security concepts. Speaking of which, when the server installs it tells you if you have an unsecure guest account and asks if you want to correct that security oversight -- something that has been added since Infoworld reviewed an early beta. (see Internet Gambit, 12/4/95)

IIS is one of two servers to support the Internet Server API (the other is Purveyor, which jointly developed the API with Microsoft. However, documentation of this API can only be found in the BackOffice Software Development Kit or by joining the Microsoft Developer Network.

One of the big strengths is the inclusion of the Database Connector software that connects SQL Server databases and the IIS. I didn't test this feature, but it is pretty clear that this is a baby step into the world of web/database integration. Expect more from lots of other vendors, including Microsoft themselves, later this year. (If you are serious about web and database integration, check out Cold Fusion or WebBase

Remote administration of IIS is tightly integrated into NT, which is both good and bad. If you only intend to administer this machine from another NT machine, and you have kept that machine upgraded with the latest Service Pack 3, then you are all set. If you have other plans in mind for the remote administration, then you might want to try either Purveyor or Netscape's Commerce Server, both of which use web forms to do the administration. The administration tool is fairly straighfoward, although it doesn't offer the flexibility and power that WebSite or Purveyor have with their products.

Another example of integration with the base NT operating system is the extensions that Microsoft has done to its Performance Monitor tool, which was a good utility that came with NT and now is even better with IIS. You can monitor connections and bytes/sec delivered by the server, among other parameters.

I had a bit of a tussle to get IIS up and running, and I am still not completely sure why. My first installation, under my own account with Administrator access, didn't work. When I reinstalled the software under the Administrator account, everything was fine. I tried out all three services on a 486/66 clone with 32 megabytes of RAM and plenty of disk: this is probably the minimum such machine you'd want to use. Ideally, I'd install this on a machine with at least double that RAM.

Overall, this is a good server for beginners. And, if you need a web server to runs on all four NT CPU types (Intel, MIPS, Alpha and PowerPC), this is the only game in town.