Quick look at IIS 2.0 services on Windows NT 4.0

I have been investigating Windows NT 4.0's features lately, and running HTTP services has been one of my key interests. Windows NT 4.0 comes with a built-in web server (and more), and it is called Internet Information Server or just IIS for short. Here is a quick summary about the available services.

After installing IIS 2.0, you should see services like these in the Windows Services Control Panel application:

• W3SVC: World Wide Web Publishing Service
• MSFTPSVC: Microsoft FTP Service
• SMTPSVC: Microsoft SMTP Service
• NNTPSVC: Microsoft NNTP Service

You can start and stop them directly from the Services applet, or use the command line with net start:

net start w3svc
net start msftpsvc
net start smtpsvc
net start nntpsvc

Each service runs independently, so you can enable only what you need. Handy if you’re just testing HTTP and want to keep the rest disabled.

Content is served from the default path:

C:\InetPub\wwwroot

That directory is created during setup. You can save a simple HTML file there and access it via http://localhost using Internet Explorer.