Connecting to Windows localhost (IIS) from another computer

Question

I have a Windows Vista laptop running IIS7 for its localhost. On this machine, I can successfully navigate to:

• "http://localhost"
• "http://127.0.0.1"
• "http://mycpuname"

However, I cannot access this localhost website from another computer on the same network. Ideally I would be able to visit "http://mycpuname" (so that I can hard-code a connection), but at this point I might settle for the IP address of the machine (http://192.000.000.xyz)

I've seen similar questions asked here and elsewhere on the internet... but none of the posts seems to fix the issue for me.

Things I've tried: - adding exceptions to Windows Firewall to allow TCP ports 80 and 8080 - disabling Windows Firewall entirely - running the "netsh" commands in this post

Additionally, I am looking at the IP address on the Windows laptop by running "ipconfig" from the command prompt. Oddly enough, trying to access "http://192.000.000.xyz" from the Windows laptop doesn't seem to work...

I have also tried restarting IIS and restarting my machine.

Help?

Answer 1

Go to windows firewall with advanced security, inbound rules and check and see if world wide web services is enabled. I had this same issue, and this fixed it for me.

Answer 2

Try netstat -na - it will show you what IP addresses your web server is listening on.

If it's only listening on 127.0.0.1, the loopback, you will have to re-configure the web server to listen on all addresses/interfaces (usually either *.*.*.*, or 0.0.0.0 in some config file, or just some drop-down in some windows dialog somewhere).

If, on the other hand, netstat tells you the web server is listening on *.*.*.* or 0.0.0.0, i.e. all interfaces, then you have to figure out what's blocking the traffic - it's either the local firewall, or something on the path between the two computers.