Personal Web Server Administration

This section provides information about administering and configuring your Web site.

Restricting Access to Your Web site

You can use Internet Services Administrator, which comes with Personal Web Server, to restrict access to your Web site by restricting access to individual users or groups, and specifying password encryption methods for your Web site.

Requiring a User name and Password

You can also require users to supply a valid Windows NT user name and password. You can have the password sent by using either basic authentication or Windows NT challenge/response authentication.

With both basic authentication and Windows NT authentication, no access is permitted to secure folders unless a valid user name and password is supplied. Password authentication is useful if you want only authorized individuals to use your server. You can have both anonymous access and authenticated access enabled at the same time.

Note

Basic Authentication

Basic authentication does not encrypt your user name and password before transmission. Basic authentication is encoded only by using base64 encoding, and can be decoded easily by anyone with access to your network or to a segment of the Internet that transfers your packets.


Caution


Windows NT Challenge/Response Authentication

The WWW service also supports the Windows NT Challenge/Response encrypted-password transmission.

Windows NT Challenge/Response authentication encrypts the user name and password, providing secure transmission of user names and passwords over the Internet. It is currently supported only by Microsoft Internet Explorer version 3.0 or later for Windows 95.

Note

Choose Difficult Passwords

The easiest way for someone to gain unauthorized access to your system is with a stolen or easily guessed password. Make sure that all passwords used on the system, especially those with administrative rights, have difficult-to-guess passwords.

Limit the Membership of the Administrator Group

By limiting the members of the Administrator group, you limit the number of users who might choose bad passwords and expose your system.

User Lists

If your computer is not set up to use user-level access control, you can control access to your Web site by creating a user list on your computer.

To add users to a user list

  1. In Control Panel, double-click the Personal Web Server icon.
  2. On the Administration tab, click Administration.
  3. On the Internet Services Administrator page, click Local User Administration.
  4. To add users to the user list, click New User.
  5. Type a user name.

Note

You can also create groups of users.

To create a group of users

  1. In Control Panel, double-click the Personal Web Server icon.
  2. On the Administration tab, click Administration.
  3. On the Internet Services Administrator page, click Local User Administration.
  4. On the Groups tab, click New Group, and then type the name of the group.

To add users to a group

  1. On the Local User Administration page, click the User/Group tab.
  2. Click a name in the list of users, click a name in the list of groups, and then click Add User To Group.

Notes

You can also restrict access to your Personal Web Server folders on a per-folder basis. You can set a folder to be read-only, or allow users to run scripts in that folder, or both.

To restrict access to a folder

  1. In My Computer, right-click the folder you want to restrict access to, and then click Sharing.
  2. Click Shared As, and then click Web Sharing.
  3. Select the Share Folder For HTTP check box.
    To make the folder read-only, click Read-Only.
    To allow users to run scripts from pages located in that folder, click Execute Scripts.

Configuring Logging for Your Web Site

You can track access to your Web site by using log files.

To enable logging

  1. In Control Panel, double-click the Personal Web Server icon.
  2. On the Administration tab, click Administration.
  3. On the Internet Services Administrator page, click WWW Administration.
  4. On the WWW Administration page, click the Logging tab.
  5. Select the Enable Logging check box, and make the changes you want.

The log file is named Inetserver_event.log. If you do not specify a log file directory on the Logging tab, the file is stored in your Windows folder.

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