Moving sites and encryption

[WylieE]

We are regularly rolling changes from our internal development site to our co-located servers for more in-depth testing.

At this point in time, encryption and SSL have not been enabled on either site. If both methods are enabled on our co-located servers (and not internally), should we expect any problems as we continue to push changes up? Do we need to enable encryption at both sites and use the same encryption key?

Thanks,
Eric.

[AbleMods]

You won't ever be able to use "the same encryption" on both machines. Encryption in .Net/AC7 is machine-specific.

The AC7 encryption involves two things so far as I know. The database.config which stores connection string info and the ac_Payments table which stores CC info.

As long as you have no need to mess with actual credit card info in your dev environment, payment encryption won't matter. The database.config can be unecrypted from the Security, Database menu option prior to move if you're moving the site files and not the data.

Pushing changes to code or libraries obviously will have no impact as they are never encrypted. If you are pushing the entire db up or down and encryption is enabled, you will have to backup encryption keys on the source site, move the db to the alternate install and then reinstall encryption keys on the alternate site.

The entire db is not encrypted, just the critical payment data.

Probably be a whole lot easier to leave encryption off until you're done changing the db so much. It's a lot of hassle to move an encrypted db as it should be