Hello everyone

I have a family friend running a real estate site built years ago with dotnetnuke. The original site developer is long gone, and will not respond to emails.

Their webhost recently informed them that they must move their site of the shared server and onto a dedicated one, as the site was pegging the cpu and affecting other sites on the machine. They forced this move over the past weekend. I will deal with the move first, then the ambiguous cpu issue.

So, I now have a fresh machine onto which I have to place the site. I have a complete backup of the web directory and the database. The new machine is running IIS7.

Bascially, I am looking for steps to migrate dnn from one production server to another.

I have searched the forum and read the sticky posts, but nothing seems to have worked. Here are the steps I took:

- created a new database on the local machine from the backup of the old
- unzipped the files backup to c:\website, so the structure structure which looks like:
c:\website (contains web.config)
c:\website\portal
c:\website\... (a number of directories and files at this level)

- modified c:\website\web.config to modify the conenction strings to the point to the restored database

- opened iis manager, right clicked sites > add web site. entered site name "rjre" and set the physical path to be c:\website

When I browse to the site, i am redirected to sitename.com/portal, whcih throws server error stating:
Description: An error occurred during the processing of a configuration file required to service this request. Please review the specific error details below and modify your configuration file appropriately.
Parser Error Message: It is an error to use a section registered as allowDefinition='MachineToApplication' beyond application level. This error can be caused by a virtual directory not being configured as an application in IIS

The details of the error highlight a line with machinekey validationkey="[bunch of numbers]"... where [bunch of numbers] is a long alphanumeric string .

OK.

So, a bit of background. I am a developer, but i have never used asp.net or dotnetnuke, and it has been 10 years since i used IIS.

I am a bit stuck! I've looked for migrating instructions, but nothing seems to be working. Can anyone help, or push me towards a resource that might? It would be *much* appreciated.