FP: How to Change ServerName for FrontPage Personal Web Server

MORE INFORMATION

ServerName affects the name the server returns to a client. For example, if a Web browser requests http://www.microsoft.com/frontpage, the server redirects that to http://www.microsoft.com/frontpage/ (with a trailing slash) so that relative links are interpreted correctly. The server does not know the name that was sent in the original request (without the trailing slash), so it typically uses the host name as returned by the Transport Control Protocol (TCP).

This can lead to problems in three cases:

• Your machine is known by multiple names and you want to control which name is returned (for example, mail.example.com and www.example.com).
• Your TCP is configured incorrectly so the server cannot determine its server name.
• You are using the FrontPage 1.0 Personal Web Server (PWS), and your hostname is not qualified (does not contain any dots). The original PWS would reject nonqualified domain names because they would be misinterpreted if they were sent outside the local domain.

The recommended solution to case 2 above is to fix your TCP/IP configuration. As an interim workaround, you might change the ServerName, but this is not preferred and will lead to problems on a networked machine.

Use the following steps to change the ServerName for the FrontPage Personal Web Server:

1. Using a text editor, such as Notepad, open the Httpd.cnf file. This file is located in the c:\FrontPage Webs\Server\conf subdirectory.
   
   In FrontPage 1.0, this file is located in the C:\Vermeer\http\conf subdirectory.
2. Locate the section which describes the ServerName directive. It looks like this:

         # ServerName allows you to set a host name that is sent back to
         # clients for your server. If it's different than the one the
         # program would get (i.e. use "www" instead of the host's real
         # name). Make sure your DNS is set up to alias the name to your
         # system!
         #
         # Format: ServerName <domain_name>
         #
         # no default

3. Add the following line:

   ServerName <domain_name>

   where <domain_name> is the name of your domain.
   
   NOTE: The server name cannot contain spaces.
   
   If you are naming your server "localhost" (without the quotation marks), type this line so that it looks like this:

   ServerName localhost

4. Save and close the file.

Restart the FrontPage Personal Web Server. It will respond to the name you typed in step 3.

NOTE: If your computer does not have DNS enabled and your TCP/IP stack supports it, you can use "localhost" (without the quotation marks) as your computer name without having to make the changes described in this article. You will also be able to specify "localhost" if your computer has a host name that is not fully qualified. To determine if your TCP/IP stack supports this configuration, run the FrontPage 1.1 TCP/IP test. In FrontPage 97, start the FrontPage Explorer, click About Microsoft FrontPage Explorer on the Help menu, and then click Network Test.