Ever see the encryption key just disappear?

[AbleMods]

I upgraded a Gold R7 client to Gold R12 this week. I walked it through each upgrade i.e. R8, R9, R10, R11 and then R12. Restarted the site each upgrade, checked the error log each upgrade.

Shortly after R12 was done, the dashboard complained that the encryption key was missing or corrupt. I had made a backup prior to upgrade, so I just did a key restore and the message cleared right away. So I'm 100% certain it took the restored key.

This evening the client is now reporting the same exact error. The R12 encryption page is showing no option to back up the key. And all I can do is restore the key. So I restored it. And the message cleared.

Again.

Any thoughts? Possibly a hosting provider permissions issue??

[Katie]

Hi Joe,

Have you tried adding a machine key to the web.config? We have seen something like this happen before, and it seems to be some elusive configuration on the server, possibly with IIS. We have one server of many that has the issue. The only way that we found to get around it is to use a machine key.

Please give it a try and let us know if that worked.

Katie

[AbleMods]

ok thanks. Yea I suspect a hosting provider situation as well. But lack the ability to prove it much.

I should know in another day or two if the issue persists. If it does, I'll load up a static machine key and see if that fixes it.

[AbleMods]

Static key in the web.config seems to have eliminated the issue. Thanks for the quick suggestion Katie.

That's only the second time I've ever seen that happen in my 9 years of AbleCommerce. It has to be a really, really unique set of circumstances to cause it.