how to view website on another network pc running iis

I have these systems that are connected to the internet via a proxy server. One of these systems (not the proxy) houses IIS for two websites.
How do I browse the website on this system from another system using a browser.
2. If I were to browse the website from outside the network how do I setup the network to allow me do this.
All the systems Im using are running Windows XP. The IIS version is 5.1

 

I'm not too sure about how your setup is, but you need to make sure to forward port 80, or whatever port you're using for http to the computer hosting the websites, also make sure your firewall isn't blocking incomming http. Once that is done you can go to http://youripaddress and that should take you to one website. To get to the other it would be http://youripaddress/whateverthefolderis.

Hope this is of some help.

 

thanks pal. im working on this. will feed you back. however, I will appreciate a detailed explaination to this. Remember my IIS server is at the back of a proxy.
"Once that is done you can go to http://youripaddress and that should take you to one website. To get to the other it would be http://youripaddress/whateverthefolderis. "
Do I use my subnet IP for this "youripaddress "?

 

When you connect to a service via TCP/IP, you always connect by IP address. You may first have to first resolve a DNS name into an IP address, but at the base level, you connect at IP.

That means that when you connect to any service you have two choices. Use an easily readable name (such as a DNS name) that resolves to an IP address belonging to the PC hosting the service; or connect using the IP address directly.

For example, you may want to connect to a popular search engine with a DNS name "www.google.com ". Before making the connection your PC first resolves the name into an IP address, and then connects by IP address.

However, you can bypass the DNS system and connect to this site directly. Try typing in the address 66.102.9.99 in your browser address bar and see where you get!

So for your system you have choices. You can use a name that resolves to an IP address to connect to the IIS server. Inside your network that can be a NetBIOS name such as the computer name. "http://mycomputername ". Via the interent (which doesn't use NetBIOS for name resolution) you can use a DNS name. Or you can use an IP address. Inside your network that will be the IP address of the PC. Outside, it will probably be the IP address of the NAT router that is forwarding port 80 packets to your PC, or the external address of the proxy server is it is doing the NAT for you network (for example, if you are using ISA as your gateway).

So all the following will connect to the PC called MyPC, with an IP address of 10.0.0.5:

From the PC only:
http://127.0.0.1
http://localhost

127.0.0.1 is a special loop back address. localhost is a name usually reserver for loopback type operation.

From inside the local area network
http://10.0.0.5
http://MyPC

If there is a DNS server on the local network and you have a local domain such as domain.local:
http://MyPC.domain.local

From the internet (external router IP something like 11.11.11.11):
http://www.yourdomainname.com
http://11.11.11.11

There are two complications. IIS by default binds to all available addresses. However, you can configure it to only bind to a certain address. I'm assuming you are using the default setting. If you set IIS to only use 127.0.0.1, it would only accept requests from the computer is was running on for example.

Secondly, webservers can host multiple domains. So if you have a site host by your ISP, connecting by IP address probably won't work, because the system won't know which of the many sites hosted by the ISP, you are trying to connect to. In this senario you must use a DNS name. Also cookies are bound at the name level. So if you have a cookie that you use on Google, it won't be called if you connect to Google using 66.102.9.99, as it sees the domain name as 66.102.9.99 and not google.com. Different name = different set of cookies.

All a proxy server does is cache requests. It means if you connect to Google twice, the second time you won't need to download all the gifs and things again as instead the proxy server will have them stored in its cache. Its a glorified router. Again, unless your set up a complicated proxy arrangement, you can ignore it as far as addressing is concerned, or treat it as a NATing router.