I'm wanting to build a web server on my home computer through IIS. I am running cable internet through a Linksys hub, so I think I'm running into security issues through my IP address. BTW... I really don't intend to run directly through my home website, but I'd like to eventually link multimedia at home through a Yahoo-based page. But I'm also trying to learn as much as I can about web development. Previously, I tried to install Apache Tomcat according to the online tutorial; it didn't work. So I've tried that route. When I try to connect to http://localhost/, I keep getting some OLE error (Sorry, not at home to pull it up right now). Suggestions please?

I seriously recommend you ditch IIS out of my personal experience. I used IIS for an ASP web host and I had dozens of problems compared to running with Apache. Why not download the latest version of Apache (the win32 MSI binary version), install it and try it out? Then just get PHP 5.0.5 from a mirror, install it and follow the instructions at the beginning of the included documentation to integrate it with Apache. Then you have the latest stable versions of Apache and PHP, the two most powerful web development applications in my opinion. You will be able to create dynamic, fresh and interesting websites and web applications with it. If you need any help whatsoever, just email me.

If u want to go the run of IIS. As James said above there is a goodfew errors ur going to run into. your using IIS on XP which I think is IIS 5.0, good stable for what its worth version. Now what have u done so far to set it up, im guessing uve installed IIS and u now have a c:\inetpub\....... folder in ur c drive,correct? Let me know if this is correct.BTW if u have a small testing .html file please put it into c:\inetpub\wwwroot\example.html

Thanks for the input. I'm not exactly sure which version of IIS I have installed at present; how can I find that? Also, I did try to install Apache Tomcat (the very version you suggested, in fact) but it didn't work for some reason, and I'm guessing it has to do with security either on my router or through my ISP's firewall. If anyone has any ideas what might be causing it, please let me know. Here is the error message I get when I go to http://localhost/: error '8002801c' Error accessing the OLE registry. /iisHelp/common/500-100.asp, line 17 I'm going to try putting an example.html in my wwwroot directory and see if it comes up. I'm also going to go download PHP 5.0.5 as suggested, and I'll be back with results. Thanks!

Okay... I think I see part of the problem. I went to www.whatismyip.com and got my IP address... but when I try to locate my home web server through that it's not finding it (I put a test page called index.html in my wwwroot directory). Because I'm going through a router, I'm sure I am missing something important about routing to my ip address... but I don't know what.