How I spent my Friday night

From an e-mail I wrote to my brother on Saturday:

I spent last night managing my computer. I’ve been wanting to write a proxy or something to customize TWeb, so first I needed to put a web server on my computer. I decided on IIS, since it would take less work than Apache. But my hard drive was getting cluttered, so before I installed anything else, I decided to clear some things off of it, and I uninstalled about 6 GB worth of programs (half of which were Baldur’s Gate). Then I got rid of some kind of spyware that was masquerading as MSN Messenger and eating up half my CPU time and I think messing up my Internet connection. I also figured if I was going to put a server on my computer I might as well make it as secure as I could, so I decided to finally install Service Pack 2. But before I did that I needed to back things up, so I did that. And since I was paranoid that SP2 would break my computer, I decided to finally reset my root password in Linux, and I found some instructions for it on the web. It turned out I could use the install CD as a bootdisk. So that worked, but I was going to have to do some other complicated stuff to get DSL to work with Linux, so I said forget it and decided to just install SP2 and take the risk. Well, that worked with no problems, as I sort of expected since Windows doesn’t really give me problems, and finally I installed IIS.

I think you have to already know all about networking to use IIS. The documentation is kind of anemic and not very helpful to a beginner. Plus most of it is in the form of a web page that you view in a browser rather than the normal help program. It was hard to find useful information on the web, too. I’ve gotten to the point where I can view a web page on localhost, but I don’t know how to set up a proxy. I have a couple of perl scripts from the web to experiment with, but I don’t know how to get Firefox to recognize it as a proxy. I’ve pointed to it in the proxy preferences. I’m guessing there’s probably some setting in IIS that’s the magic key to getting it to work, but the web hasn’t been terribly helpful.