Windows Knowledge Base

[Server Tutor] Manage Web services using IIS 6.0 in windows 2003 Environment Part Two

Part 2 Creating and Working with Virtual Directories
Virtual directories are great ways to make a site's structure easy to navigate for your users, even if the actual content stored on physical disks is located in several different locations or on several different computers. Not only does a well-formed virtual directory structure make a site easy to use for a web surfer, but it increases the flexibility of management for the web developer. It also provides a layer of security through obscurity because the virtual directory need not correspond directly to a physical directory on a hard disk.

Here is the process to create a virtual directory for a Web site. (The FTP server virtual directory creation process is very similar to this.)
1. Open IIS Manager.
2. Select the server and right-click on the Web site.
3. Select New | Virtual Directory

4. Enter a name for the alias that users will specify to refer to this virtual directory. This is the text that comes after the / in the URL. e.g http://www.windowspeople.com/tutor in this example

5. Next, specify the location of the content that will populate this virtual directory. You can enter either a local path or a UNC network path, depending on whether you're mapping a local or remote path.

6. On the Security Credentials screen, specify the account and password used to authentic
ate to the network resources that hold the content for the virtual directory if necessary.
7. The Virtual Directory Access Permissions screen appears. Specify all the permissions you'd like to grant to the directory (the choices are the standard ones covered earlier in this chapter: read, run scripts, execute, write, and browse).

8. Click Finish to confirm the creation of the virtual directory.