Well, I got the family site up and running today on the internet, but it was not without incident. This was my first WSS install against SQL Server Express on the same machine. I had gone against SQL Server on the same machine as IIS before, but it had been a while. I answered Basic Standalone instead of advanced when running the config program, and had a couple of false starts before I finally got it going.

Here is my check list of Required Software and Settings before installation

1. Windows 2003 Server (as of this writing, only x86 should be used because there is no Adobe IFilter for x64 which means that PDF's cannot be indexed. If PDF indexing and 64-bit is an absolute must, a pricey 3^rd-party solution is available at Foxit, and Adobe is also working on a presumably free solution.)
2. IIS 6.0
3. WWW Services
   1. Remote Admin (optional)
   2. WebDav Publishing
   3. WWW
4. Common Files
5. IIS Manager
6. SMTP
7. ASP.Net 2.0 Framework
8. Windows Workflow Foundation (installed via .Net Framework 3.0)
9. Allow ASP.Net in list of IIS Web Server Extensions
10. Determine Database Information:
    1. Name of db server and database name (just make sure the database name is not already being used)
    2. Username and password for the database account that will be used to administer the server farm.
       1. This user must be a Windows user, not just a SQL Server login account
       2. This should be a service account whose password does not change
11. Determine System Account information. Typically this is an Active Directory user with Administrator privileges on the SP server machine.
    1. This should be a service account whose password does not change

Before wiring in to SharePoint, I dabbled quite a bit with SharePoint-like DotNetNuke, so much so that when I got my new hosted server, I bought a license for and installed DotNetPanel, a web hosting front end which allows one to host many web and FTP sites, databases, mail, etc. with a web-based GUI front end. There is a way to set up a new customer and specify a domain for it without actually setting up the site. This creates the DNS entries, FTP logins and lets me use its GUI if I want to create email accounts. Once I was able to ping the server via the domain, proving the DNS entries were there, I created a new web application and a blank site in a new site collection. Then I restored a backup which I made from a nifty batch file that I wrote.

One little snag is that I set up the web app on a custom port on my new domain before remembering that the host provider closes most ports. I have extended it to an internet site on port 80 where everyone can see it, and where I may one day enable FBA. So now I can either ask the host provider to open the port up, or just extend the site once more to the "extranet" zone, and make a subdomain like http://admin.gfam.com. I guess I could just use port 80 for now, and if / when we go FBA, deal with it then.