Keeping a development webserver alive is almost a daytime task for me. Blogging some the tricks I learned lead to so much responses from fellow desperates. Most of the problems are due to a lack of rights. So here is another trick.

I mainly use an XP localhost for development. To see how  the site behaves on a consumer's machine I take my wife's or the kid's XP home machine to view some pages. Since we have sp2 installed this no longer works out of the box, a request like http://Brochis/MyWebApp/ (Brochis is my VS box) would result in a “Cannot find server or dns error”. Here you bump your request agaianst the sp2 firewall. To be able to browse to a XP-pro “localhost” webserver from another machine in your local network you have to apply these settings on the webserver

• Windows firewall
• Exceptions
• Add port 80
• Set the scope to My network (subnet)

Peter