networking - Viewing my IIS hosted site on other machines on my network

Question

At home I have a simple network setup containing 2 machines.

On one machine i have a site hosted with IIS7. Rather than the standard localhost/index.htm address I have added an entry in the HOSTS file pointing the local IP (127.0.0.1) to this domain - www.mysite.dev.

I can access the site with www.mysite.dev with no problem.

what I would like to do is be able to view this site from my other machine on the network.

Initially I assumed this could be done with a URL like so MACHINE-NAME/www.mysite.dev, but the connection always times out. But I can ping MACHINE-NAME without problems.

For testing purposes I have disabled the windows firewall on both machines but to no joy.

Like a typical web developer, my hardware/network skills are pretty poor.

Can anyone see where I'm going wrong?

Answer 1

As others said your Firewall needs to be configured to accept incoming calls on TCP Port 80.

in win 7+ (easy wizardry way)

1. go to windows firewall with advance security
2. Inbound Rules -> Action -> New Rule
3. select Predefined radio button and then select the last item - World Wide Web Services(HTTP)
4. click next and leave the next steps as they are (allow the connection)

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• Because outbound traffic(from server to outside world) is allowed by default .it means for example http responses that web server is sending back to outside users and requests

• But inbound traffic (originating from outside world to the server) is blocked by default like the user web requests originating from their browser which cannot reach the web server by default and you must open it.

You can also take a closer look at inbound and outbound rules at this page