If you have been reading through this recipe book from start to finish, you probably noticed that we utilize our "new web server" a lot when testing or rounding out tasks in our infrastructure. So our web server has a whole bunch of things on it that have been pushed down as a result of regular network tasks that we did, but we aren't doing any actual web serving with it yet!

We are going to assume for most tasks in this chapter that the role for IIS is already installed onto the web server. This role is specifically called Web Server (IIS) in the list of roles, and there are numerous additional features that we can add to IIS. For all of our recipes, we only need the defaults added, the ones that are selected automatically when installing the role. That role installation is the only thing a Windows Server 2012 R2 box needs in order to serve up web pages to users, other than a little bit of knowledge on how to get the site doing what you want it to do. In order to get the role...