>>>My ISP threatens to pull my plug if I install any Web servers - that's in the contract etc. Now I want to do some local Web development, and turning the modem off, launching IIS, making sure nobody needs the Web on the other machine, shutting down IIS when I'm done, yelling to the other room that Web is available, turning on the modem... doing this each time is a real pain in the wrong region.
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>>>Is there a way to set IIS to behave like a decent PWS, or is there a way to get a PWS for W2k Pro? The search for the latter on MS website yielded only the stuff from NT4 option pack, which refuses to install on W2k. Or, if such an animal doesn't exist, how do I tell IIS to be invisible to the outer world?
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>>Why not just firewall it so you don't accept packets from the Internet destined to the box on port 80 or 8080? - what happens inside your LAN shouldn't matter to your ISP.
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>Thanks, I think this is all I needed to know. I thought I'd need a way to block any request comming from outside to my IP address, which changes daily (they unhook me at least once a day, at unpredictable times). I do have some freeware firewall (can't afford any shopping at the moment), and blocking just two ports would be easy with it.

The WinGate software from Deerfield I mentioned handles all this transparently; I use the Pro (= not free) version for some additional features that it offers that the standard version does not. I also use their MDaemon mail server product, and something called DNS2Go, a mechanism which allows you to have a domain (in reality, a sub-domain of their primary domain) that can be registered, even with a dynamic IP address to manage a private, portable domain - I can go to any one of my client sites and establish a temporary DNS-resolved domain, that will give me a consistent way of addressing them even if all they have is dynamic IP. This works with things like PCAnywhere, NetMeeting or XP's Remote Assistance.