I have a requirement to run 3 copies of DNN on a single server - one live for one site, another live with 2 sites and a throwaway one for a prospective customer. Keeping them seperate means I can maintain individual backups and run them on different instances of SQL Express to ensure they stay iunder the 2Gb limit.

They all run on the same box with in the same instance of IIS.

I need to know what best paractice is to seperate the sites completely:

1) Should you have different values for each site for the attributes in the machineKey? If so, how do you generate them?

2) Should I use different cookie names for each instance. I'm struggling to remember how authentication cookies work and I'm worried about user from one site gaining access to another simply by logging on.

Thanks in advance.

I don't think your last statement is correct.  I'm having a heck of a time with this issue.

I have two DNN3.2.2 sites on two seperate servers with two seperate domain names.  Still, if users go to both sites the cookies/authentication seems to get mumbled and results in viewstate errors, bad data errors, and users being logged out all the time.

Maybe it will be different for you.  I'm still trying to get this problem sorted out but from what I've read there seems to be some quirks with the authentication cookie structure.

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I'm too poor for anything other than the community version