See? We have another search friendly term. Turns out that google responds nicely to "IIS7". Also, I have found much better results when I quote "Windows 7" for google. It causes the search engine to treat that as a single word instead of giving me every page that has the word 'windows' in it. Enjoy.
The permissions thing I thought about last night is not the answer. The binding for localhost has the exact same permissions issues and it works just fine. I guess I'd rather this was the problem but, what the heck, at least it's another issue off the list.
Next, I am trying to figure out how to debug IIS7 in general. I looked at the places it appears to offer log files. Not much there.
Then, I got the idea to see if I could ping the site name (www.sandbox.local) from my command line. Localhost works. Sandbox, not so much. It "could not find host". Looking around, google showed me a guy named Mike Volodarsky. Check him out. He has some good-looking info on his site. Among those is a page specific to IIS7 server not found. Reading it, it became clear that my problem resembles a DNS failure. In localhost terms, that means that Windows 7 has the equivalent of the unix hosts file.
In fact, it has exactly that. I dug through and found a wikipedia page that talks all about hosts files. For Windows 7 (and most other modern MS operating systems), the hosts file is at C:\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. Off I go but, notepad won't see it. Arrrgh! It's hidden. Open. Can't save. Arrrgh! Since I am running underneath of OSX and not serving outside my environment, I just changed the permissions to let any authorized user (aka, me) have full priveleges. Voila!
I entered:
127.0.0.1 *.sandbox.local
Save. Great hopes. Nope. Ping still says no such host. Have I said, Arrrgh! lately?
I tried restarting IIS7 by selecting my new entry in the manager and clicking restart. No dice. This makes no sense.
Obviously, time for reboot.
And ping works. And firefox shows me the next layer of this stinky onion.
"Cannot read configuration file due to insufficient permissions" from IIS Web Core.
Along the way, I found that there is an 'Authentication' icon that offers, among other things, "Anonymous Authentication". This is enabled. Not the problem, but good to know about.
I found somebody who has exactly this problem, including the fact that he's trying to run his website out of his Documents folder. He says, "To fix this problem, we need to grant the read permission to IIS_IUSRS on ‘httdocs’ folder." Ok. How?