The installed version potal defaults to localhost / dotnetnuke.  

So I create a new one called www.totalgarage.ca / dotnetnuke  and I go into IIS and for totalgarage I create a virtual directory called "dotnetnuke" that points to the same folder as the virtual directory in the localhost one

When I then type www.totalgarage.ca / dotnetnuke it will send me to localhost \ dotnetnuke which on my laptop doesn't help as I am not running a web server on it.  So what steps did I mess up on?

Help! Please! and thank you

Quentin

So after many hours of mucking this is what I have figured out, I hope this helps someone else as well. 

There is a correlation between the Host Settings and the Portal settings that is not mentioned in the help.  In the Host Settings you can select a portal.  This is what all your portal aliases get mapped to.  The default one is localhost/dotnetnuke.

And I created one called foo / dotnetnuke and when I went to foo / dotnetnuke it sent me to localhost/dotnetnuke. 

Now I could be off a bit, but the dotnetnuke path portion on the portal alias is required to match the virtual directory you have created in your IIS entry for the website. 

If anyone has any additional information it would be great.  Oh I have fund that depending on your browser that "Tree like menu" for help works, and for other browsers its just an image...  would have been nice if DNN used a proper tree component as it would have helped a little bit.   Alas the help doesn't correlate the fields, only discusses them one by one.