Q My school has been working on an intranet site that we hope will contain just basic information on courses at the school. We just threw all the files into a folder on the network and ran them like a local drive web site. We would now like to incorporate the Lycos Intranet Site Spider into the site. The installation program asks for HTTP addresses and paths.

A The main interaction between a web browser and web server is that the browser asks for a particular file and the server sends it. You can set up an intranet over a network (as you have) simply by putting the files on the hard drive of a server. The web browser opens the files in the same way that you can open files sitting on your local hard drive. This setup has the advantage that the files are only available to people on the local network who have logged into the server and who have permissions to access those files. Such an intranet is very secure.

This approach has limitations, however. Additional functionality is added to web sites by having the web server program make calls to external programs such as the Lycos Intranet Site Spider. Unfortuately, you can't do this if your files are merely sitting in a folder on the server. To be able to use the Intranet Spider or any other intranet search tool you will need to install web server software. Your network will also need to use the TCP/IP protocol.

This is not that difficult to set up and well worth doing as a long-term solution. If you are using Windows NT server, you will find that it comes bundled with web server software (Internet Information Server). If you are using a peer-to-peer network with NT Workstation or 95, check out the Personal web Server, downloadable from www.microsoft.com. Additional freeware and shareware TCP/IP tools can be found at www.tucows.com.