Hello Tracey.

One thing that kind of sucks about DNN is the plethora of unanswered questions that pervades these forums. (I have one for the User Accounts that has gone unanswered for weeks!)  At the end of the day we are at the mercy of the project for support.  Be that as it may, I have done what you are asking on a single server.  I have a production instance and I needed to create a test/development instance.  I am currently working on making a copy on a second server (a workstation class machine) so I can't directly help with that case right now unitl I have sussed it out for myself.

Here is what I did:

1) I made a copy of the existing dnn folder (dnn3013) and this is pointed to by virtual directory (dnn3)

2) I ran the backup (with verification) on the SQL Server of the dnn v3 db and this resulted in a back up file being created dnnv3bu

3) I then made a second copy of the current folder (copy of dnn3013) and pointed a new virtual directory (dnn3new) to that folder.

4) I restored the dnn v3 backup to a new name (this is all taking place on one server running W2K server IIS 5 and SQL server 2K) and this all worked fine.

5) I changed the web.config in the copy of the dnn3013 folder to point to the newly restored db.

6) Restarted IIS

7) I ran a SQL query to update the PortalAlias table with the new value.  Restarted IIS (this was key...I believe IIS caches the DB info) and it works.  Thank you.  It took me some time to get the value just right, but it does work. 

Anyway, that was all on a single server, which is not really what you want, but it may get you started...

Please feel free to reply with any questions. 

Regards,

ltm

Hello.

I just got done making a copy of my production environment and moving it to test. 

 Here's what I did: 

1) Backed up the production SQL Server 2000 DNN database

2) Backed up the DNN file system

3) Created a compressed copy of the files

4) ftp'd the copy of the files from the production server to the development server

5) Extracted the files on the development server

6) I created a user named ‘dnn_database_owner’ and made that user the db owner using sp_changedbowner.

7) Then I created a ODBC data source and tested the connection to the db successfully.

8) So, now I recreated the DNN file system on the dev server.  I had a zip file so I just extracted it to my dev server.

9) So now to update the web.config. The only bits that I changed were the connect string for SQL server and the machine and encrypt keys.  I run SQL Express but I use the traditional connect string and it actually works nicely.

My Connect string:

<!-- Connection String for SQL Server 2000/2005 -->

    <add name="SiteSqlServer" connectionString="Server=justinepiatt\sqlexpress;Database=dnn_copilink_portal;uid=dbowner;pwd=password" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" />

I also just dropped the extra users that came over with my production database and create a new user to own my test copy of the database.  This was easy.  Create the user give it all the permissions you want and then use the sp_changedbowner stored procedure to change database ownership.

10) I also updated the portalalias table in the database via SQL to remove unwanted urls and added my new sites one.

11) I created my virtual directory and amazingly, the site came right up.

So the key for me was access to the DNN db.

I hope this helps others that are trying to replicate their environment to test with.  I am sure there will be some issued with urls on my site that have server references to my production server, but that is small potatoes for me.  The imporatant thing is being able to test stuff before putting it in production.  Feel free to ask me anything.

Peace,

ltm