help me understand localhost

I've been trying to run IIS 5 as a testing server for my web projects. My testing pc is in a LAN using a Dlink router to also share DSL connection.

I don't expect to serve my website from this PC, just to have a localhost able to process my ASP scripts for testing.

Now, for some reason, the localhost doesn't work at all. I've made three fresh installations of IIS 5 on my W2k PC and all the time, the same: typing http://localhost/ results in error page cannot find server or DNS error.

One thing that is curious (or maybe symptom of my mistakes) is that it takes a lot of time (like 3 minutes) for explorer to give me this error page.

I would appreciate if somebody can guide me through the process of setting up my IIS-router-localhost successfuly

Thanks in advance.

Now this: I went back to IIS and checked the default website configuration, it has ip address 127.0.0.1 and port 80. So I right clicked one of the help pages included when you install the server and selected browse. The page opened.

I thought the the issue was resolved. Well it isn't.

Now when I type http://localhost/, internet explorer starts opening... the progress bar is getting bigger but nothing, takes at least 10 minutes to give me the error mentioned before.

localhost is a standardized alias for the 127.0.0.1 ip address, which is the local loopback address.

On most machines, localhost is defined in a hosts file. On windows, you will find the hosts file in \windows or \windows\system32\drivers\etc

If you open a command prompt window in a windows os you should be able to issue:

ping localhost

and get replies back from 127.0.0.1

If that all works and you open a web browser to http://localhost and don't get a web page back, then it's time to review your IIS installation.

Thanks Doug G, the piece that was creating some strees in all this process was the router. I found that the router assigns dynamic IP addresses to computers attached to it, so I started using this IP instead of 127.0.0.1 and now it works fine.

I appreciate your input.

Hi

For more convenience, you can use your "computer name" instead of its ip address. For example, "http://<ComputerName>/<VirtualDirectoryName>"