I spend alot of time building hosting environments and when implementing load balancing (NLB or otherwise!) there are a few important configuration steps needed to ensure things hang together nicely at the application layer. Most of these are to do with the keys used by the applications. MCMS has managekey.exe for it's cookies, but ASP.NET also needs it's keys synced, unless you enjoy angry customers. This is especially true for no affinity solutions, so the golden rule is to sync, always!

The perf and deploy guide for MCMS details the HashConfig.exe tool "on the MCMS CD", but as most of you know this EXE is nowhere to be found on the CD (it doesn't exist anywhere as far as I can tell). UPDATE: Stefan let me know that this is actually included in the 65Mb MSIB download, which I had overlooked.

The answer is in an ASP.NET KB, which is badly written in so much as it reads as if this is only needed when doing forms auth, which is not the case.

It gets tiresome using quickedit in cmd.exe. So I've put together a very simple app to ease the pain a little. Not much, but a little. For customers, I've extended the tool to find the relevant entry in system.config and update it - for use in MCMS application installer packages.