2 seemingly related IIS and IE7 Vista issues

I recently upgraded to Vista Home Premium (I like it) but I can not for the life of me figure out how to reactivate my IIS server. I installed IIS 7 and have opened port 80 and done all of the port forwarding and pass through on my Linksys that is necessary (this worked very well under XP and IIS 5.5 with the same Linksys settings on the same physical machine). Can anyone suggest a good knowledgeable resource for assistance?

The second issue may be related. I can not get to any external web sites via IE 7 when I am connected via Cisco VPN to any of my clients' sites. This was never an issue under IE 7 and XP and I can not seem to figure out what setting to change.

1) It's not obvious what the actual symptom or error message is with regards to your IIS setup. If you provide a more detailed explanation, someone may be able to help. The first thing I'd suggest you do is use NETSTAT -NAO to check whether IIS is actually bound and "listening" on TCP port 80. If so, you might just need to configure Vista's firewall to allow inbound HTTP connections. Disable the firewall briefly to check whether it's part of the problem.

2) If they know their (VPN) business, the act of establishing the VPN will configure your network stack to use their edge router as the default gateway. After that, your incidental internet access (browsing in this instance), goes through their network via the VPN, and not directly to the target web server. Whether that's allowed or not depends on the company's VPN setup. Otherwise, if you can connect to both a corporate network via VPN, and also the whole internet at the same time, you're doing what's called "split tunnelling" and your machine becomes a point of entry into their corporate network which can allow all sorts of nasties to infiltrate. That's a no-no from a security standpoint.

wow, this is excellent information. I just ran netstat as suggested and noticed that the IP under the "local address" heading next to port 80 "LISTENING" is "[::]" where it is my server's local IP next to other "LISTENING" ports. Is this pointing to something?

Thanks also for the "VPN" information. That was also a great help.

[::] is IPv6-speak. You'll presumably also want IIS bound to an IPv4 address, and it sounds like that's not happening right now.

Under the website properties (in IIS), there's the option of binding only to a specific IP or interface. Make sure you're not selecting something restrictive there.

Thanks for the info. Would you happen to know how I bind to IP4 and where I might find the interface?