I am moving our hosting environment to a completely new data center with new mailboxes, hardware and software ... the whole deal.
The cookies of our site are encrypted using machineKey, so when I make a request to my domain and point it to a new web server (by overriding the local hosts file), I get an error because the cookie could not be decrypted because the machine the key is different. I would like to avoid any problems that frequent users may encounter when they first appear on a new server.
As far as I know, at the moment I think that I need to install the same MachineKey from our current servers on our new servers. Thus, when past visitors with a cookie arrive on our website served by the new server, the cookie will be decrypted correctly using MachineKey, after which it was encrypted and then correctly registered.
My question is, where can I find the MachineKey value (on IIS 6 win2k3 server), so can I use this value to statically stat it on my new servers? I stopped the machine.config file, but it does not specify the key, it only defines the configuration where the key can be defined. This is not in my web.config for the application or elsewhere.
I found this wonderful article about some MachineKey and Web Garden issues (which could explain some other errors that I experienced considering machineKey).
Update
I will return to this issue and still face a similar problem. I have a MachineKey generated automatically on an IIS6 server, but I need to get this exact key so that I can set it explicitly and not have it automatically generated.
Any help is appreciated ...
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