I've really been struggling with installation, but I think I have a good one now and I am getting close.  I am trying to host my own site on the internet on a company server, Windows 2003 / SQL Express 2005.  I have everything working on the inside, but I can't get it to work from the outside.  The site is in a virtual directory called ePortal under the Default website in IIS.  I know this is working because I dropped in a page in the virtual directory called default.asp from an older site and also one called login.aspx that I developed in .NET3.5 before I found DotNetNuke. 

I can get to these from the outside like this:

www.mydomain.com/ePortal/default.asp and www.mydomain.com/ePortal/login.aspx , so I assume my directory permissions and such are correct.

But if I try to go to www.mydomain.com/ePortal/default.aspx I get a DotNetNuke page with this message.

DotNetNuke Error: - Version 04.08.02

A transport-level error has occurred when sending the request to the server. (provider: Shared Memory Provider, error: 0 - The pipe is being closed.)

If I try it without the page, as in www.mydomain.com/ePortal/,   I get - Invalid URI: The hostname could not be parsed.

I have played around with port aliases and think that is maybe the problem, but nothing has worked for me yet. I searched for these errors in the forums, but nothing turned up. Any suggestion? 

Ok, I got this going by piecing together other posts with similar but not exactly the same problem. 

In the situation described above, where my site is in a virtual directory called ePortal, the portal alias needed to be www.mydomain.com/ePortal .  I had tried this before and it did not work, but then I saw another post that mentioned that when you add or change a portal alias you need to 'Restart the Application'  before it is effective.  You do this from the Host login, then the Host menu, Host Settings page.  Once I restarted, all is well. 

Hope this helps others being driven crazy.

You don't bind to a virtual directory.  You have to specify a virtual directory on the URL when requesting the page and it has to be in the alias.  In otherwords, to get http://www.sample.com/DNN/Default.aspx to work as a DNN site, you have to have a portal alias of www.sample.com/DNN.

Jeff