1.2.2- Using other Operating Systems with this Book

Using other Operating Systems with this Book

If you're planning to use a machine that's running a system other than Windows 2000 as your web server, don't worry – you can still build, publish and test ASP pages, but you'll need to download or purchase an ASP-supporting web server.

If you're in this position, you should note that many web servers don't come with ASP built-in – indeed, some web servers are not capable of supporting ASP at all. So you need to be careful when choosing your web server. Let's have a closer look at this.

Web Servers on Older Versions of Windows

If you're installing Windows NT Server 4.0 to serve web pages, then Microsoft's IIS 2.0 web server is an option available as part of the installation, and IIS 3.0 is available as part of Service Pack 3. A preferable alternative is to install IIS 4.0, which is available for free as part of Microsoft's Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack. You can download the Option Pack from Microsoft's web site, at http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/nts/downloads/recommended/NT4OptPk/default.asp . Note that IIS 4.0 supports ASP 2.0.

If you're using running Windows NT Workstation 4.0, Windows 95, or Windows 98, then you can use Microsoft's Personal Web Server (PWS) as your web server software. Again, PWS supports ASP 2.0 and is currently available from the NT 4.0 Option Pack. It's worth noting that while PWS on Windows 95 and 98 was an individual product, PWS on Windows NT Workstation was in fact IIS 4.0 under a different name.

John Kauffman created a comprehensive set of instructions on the installation and setup of PWS for another book. We've reproduced those notes here in Appendix E . However, we don't really recommend running Windows 9x or NT 4 here in 2007 and later. With the emphasis on security in more recent Windows versions and especially in the web servers with them, along with the fact that these older Windows versions are no longer supported by Microsoft and don't receive the security updates that newer versions do, running these older versions may be an unnecessary security risk.

So if you are running a later version of Windows (XP, Vista, Server 2003, Server 2008) we've added these brief notes about IIS and other web servers for those newer versions. 

Web Servers on Other Operating Systems

There are many web servers available. Some (such as Netscape's web server) are available commercially; others (such as the Apache web server) are available for free. Some of these web servers may support ASP, and others won't. 

When Microsoft released ASP 1.0, it was as an extension that could be installed onto an existing Microsoft web server. This 'extension' was just a piece of software that was written to run on a server operating system, and could be installed by the system administrator. But this extension could only be used in conjunction with Microsoft web servers. Since then, other companies have worked to provide ASP support for other web servers, and on platforms other than Windows. The two vendors and products that were mentioned in the print version of the book (Chili!Soft and Halcyon Software) no longer are around but there are several other products including some free ones you can use to run ASP on other servers. The Classic ASP FAQ has a page listing some other web server add-ons you can consider.

Once your web server has the ASP support software loaded and running, you can use it to host and interpret pages containing ASP code. Once again, it's worth noting that it isn't possible to run ASP on all web servers, even with ASP extension software installed – so check with these providers to confirm that their products will provide support for your web server.