[thelist] intro/NT workstation PWS question/color tips

Hi Erin (and list)

My knowledge of PWS is pretty basic still (isn't it fun? not!) but I'll give 
it a shot.  Here's a couple of potentially very basic suggestions of things 
to check, which you may already have tried so I apologize in advance if this 
is redundant:

Do you have a dedicated internet connection or are you doing this via a 
dialup ISP?  AFAIK, with a dedicated connection PWS will use the name of 
your computer to serve the pages, as in http://<mymachine>, whereas a dialup 
ISP will assign you a dynamic IP address, such as 
http://<123.456.789.0>/<mypage.asp>, so PWS will use that to serve the 
pages. So this can cause confusion.

Which brings up another question... do you have an active connection when 
you try to do this?  When we were first trying to make PWS go, we, uh, 
didn't realize that was necessary :) (doh! buncha lousy designers...)  This 
is because PWS needs to access DNS or WINS to resolve names.

Also I don't know if you've done this or not, but apparently it is a Bad 
Thing<tm> to change the alias of the root directory in PWS.  A quote from 
MSDN:
"To allow people to access Web pages on your computer, you must share the 
folder that contains the Web page in Personal Web Server and assign an alias 
to the folder. The alias for the folder must be used to access Web pages in 
the folder instead of the actual folder name. For additional information 
about sharing folders in Personal Web Server, see the "Sharing Folders" 
section in this article.

If the Web page you want to access is located in the home root folder, you 
do not need to specify a folder alias in the address. Note that the alias 
for the home root folder should not be changed. Doing so can cause problems 
that may require you to reinstall Personal Web Server. "

Here's the whole MSDN article: How to Configure and Administer PWS (watch 
the wrap) http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q158/7/21.ASP you 
might also want to try surfing around MSDN if you haven't already.  I am 
there nearly every day trying to solve one thing or another... there or 
http://support.microsoft.com.

This might also be a problem somewhere outside PWS, maybe having to do with 
the date/time stamp on updated files or caching or something like that.  
That's a stretch but I have run into things like that before, where the most 
updated version of the file was not being displayed by the browser.  
Unfortunately it never seemed to fall into any sort of pattern so I can't 
offer a solution but it's a thought anyway.

ok hope that helps.  also hopefully somebody with more PWS experience than 
me can field this one.  sorry to be so long-winded but it's late and i don't 
have time to make this shorter :)

--Peggy Daniels
pegdaniels@hotmail.com
pkd@astonit-us.com



----Original Message Follows----
From: Erin Kissane <ekissane@sapient.com>
2. I've just started trying to make asp go on MS Personal Web Server on
an NT workstation (not my choice of platform, don't blame me)and I'm
having a rough time with PSW.  I've got it up and working, but now I
can't get it to recognize changes I've made to files in the root
directory.  I really *really* don't want to get stuck using the
ridiculous Web Publishing Wizard -- how can I make it recognize changes
without renaming the directory in which the changed files resides (which
is the only thing that's worked)?



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