HELP! Can't get localhost to work without "Error 500" message!

[Guest]

After using Windows 2000 for several years, I recently purchased a laptop
with Vista Home Premium installed. Since I do some simple web development on
a couple of sites I have (I use Macromedia Homesite to write the code), I set
up IIS. In Windows 2000 I used the PWS interface, which was delightfully
simple. Since Vista doesn't seem to have any equivalent to PWS, at least as
far as I can see, I'm struggling to find my way through IIS itself.

After setting up a default web directory in IIS, I tried to access it through
localhost, but got an error message (Error 500) with a long explanation of
possible problems. The most likely seemed to relate to either authentication
or something in the congiguration of IIS, but I was still not able to get
localhost to access the directory. I just want to set up the web site on my
computer for local access from my computer for development purposes, and will
then FTP to the outside host for public access. Any suggestions on what I
need to do to use localhost successfully, as well as how to make sense of and
simplify IIS for my basic purposes, would be appreciated.

 

[Michael]

Larry,

Did you place your web in c:\inetpub ?
I am just fooling around with IIS but found that if I placed my web at
c:\inetpub and made sure that it had the same security permissions as the
default wwwroot did that it worked fine for me. I have not tried placing the
web elsewhere but would assume that it would at least want to have the same
security setting as 'wwwroot' does.

My goal was to get my Vista Home Premium to serve as a web page server from
the outside network. My Verizon account blocks port 80 and I have a dynamic
IP address so those were complications that I think I have gotten fixed.

Michael