#Migration
Migrating an Old .aspx Site to a JSON Catalog and Filtering Images
The owner of an old .aspx site asked me to rebuild it, but more than a decade of content was in a database I could no longer access. I collected the pages from the site itself to build a JSON catalog that preserved every legacy_id, then wrote a three-layer image filter to keep stray QR codes from becoming article covers.
Moving JSON Time Series to Columns Without Changing the Dashboard
I stored entire device frames as JSON arrays at one row per second. After two weeks, the tables had grown to 183 MB at the endpoint and 625 MB on the server, with JSON_EXTRACT queries that could not use an index — here is how I moved the data into int columns and had the API rebuild a sparse array without changing a single line of the dashboard.
One Codebase, Two Roles: Hosted Web, Worker at Home
The whole system used to run on one machine behind a home internet connection. When that machine went down, the team could not use anything. I split it into two roles using the same codebase — the web runs on an always-on host, while heavy work stays on the home machine, which pulls jobs itself, with an atomic job-claim table and an 18-step cutover plan with a rollback path.
Every File Is Backed Up, but I Still Can't Rebuild the Server
The database dump is complete, the code tar is complete, and all the secrets are there, but put them on a blank machine and the site will not come up, because the things that actually make the server work were never in the backup files. This article lists what disappears with the machine and the recovery sequence I wrote for my future self.
Charset Mismatch Silently Kills JOIN Indexes — an utf8mb4 Mirror
The old database uses tis620 and the new one uses utf8mb4. JOIN across databases, and every index immediately becomes decorative without a single error — how to prove it with EXPLAIN and build a mirror that converts tis620 to utf8mb4 during the dump, plus the sed trap that silently breaks tables.
Migrating vBulletin 4.2.5 to Flarum: Lessons from 200,000 Posts
Migrating an old vBulletin 4.2.5 forum with over seven thousand members, over twenty thousand threads, and over two hundred thousand posts to Flarum — notes on pitfalls that cost real time, from guest userid 0 breaking FK constraints across an entire batch, nested md5 hashes for old passwords, and converting BBCode to s9e XML, to attachments stored on disk instead of in the DB and why I had to scp scripts instead of using heredoc
Thai Data Migration Traps: VARCHAR, Idempotency, and OCR Vowels
Lessons from importing and migrating hundreds of thousands of Thai data rows — undersized VARCHAR columns silently truncating synthetic keys into collisions, idempotency requiring DELETE before INSERT to stop totals reaching 200%, collation treating su001 and SU001 as equal while storing both, and Thai vowels corrupted by OCR that need a normalization map before insert
Screenshot Multiple Domains Directly from Origin, Bypassing Cloudflare
Need screenshots of dozens of domains for inspection, or want to confirm that the origin server (not the CDN cache) renders correctly — but Chrome's screenshot flag has been broken since version 132, and AV reverts hosts edits? This article uses Playwright to override DNS at the process level, solving both problems.
Legacy Apps Break After Migration — MariaDB Strict Mode Errors
After moving a website from an old server to a new one, the registration form breaks even though the code has not changed — the cause is STRICT_TRANS_TABLES in the sql_mode of newer MariaDB versions, with fixes at 3 levels, from conf.d to per-app SET SESSION
Lost the .com: Move to .net on DirectAdmin Without Data Loss
A .com domain expired and ended up with a domain squatter — how I moved the whole site (files/mail/DNS/SSL) to a new .net domain on DirectAdmin with a single CMD_CHANGE_DOMAIN command, plus 4 follow-up tasks that do not happen automatically
Using Claude to Upgrade Proxmox 8 to 9 and Rebuild Windows VMs
A real case using VS Code + Claude to upgrade an entire Proxmox cluster from 8 to 9, then delete and rebuild all Windows VMs for VDI without ever SSHing into a host myself. I have laid out the commands and scripts Claude generated during the actual work as steps that a person or AI can read and run again.
qcow2 or ZFS — Why I Switched After 12 Years on the Same Server
The reasons behind my storage choices for a Proxmox server that has run for 12 years without a reinstall — why I chose qcow2 in 2014, why I only moved to ZFS in 2026, and what actually changed the calculus.
DirectAdmin from CentOS 7 to Debian 12 on Proxmox (Series Index)
Notes on migrating a DirectAdmin shared host from CentOS 7 (EOL) to Debian 12 on Proxmox, serving 80+ customers, split into 5 parts with an overview of the process and links to every part
DA Migration Finale — Security Fixes and Hardening After Stabilizing
Wrapping up the cross-distro DirectAdmin migration series with security work after the server stabilized — sudoers wildcard CVE, OpenSSL SECLEVEL, ModSec exclusions before CRS, a csfpost drop-in, and 5 layers that survive DA updates
Moving DA from CentOS 7 to Debian 12, Part 4 — Cutover and 17 Issues
The actual cutover, where the near-0 downtime plan fell apart because of the DA Legacy license and slow qcow2 reads, ended with 1 hour of downtime and 17 issues in quick succession after the switch — critical web stack outages, medium issues affecting subsets of services, and minor debugging notes.
DA Migration Part 3 — DirectAdmin + CustomBuild on Debian 12
Installing DirectAdmin through setup.sh, then assembling a stack with multiple PHP versions, MariaDB, ModSecurity, and rspamd using CustomBuild on a staging VM behind NAT, including pitfalls I ran into myself.
Moving DA to Debian 12, Part 2 — Switching Storage to a ZFS Mirror
Replace the three storage layers of mdadm RAID1 + ext4 + qcow2 with a single layer of ZFS mirror + raw zvol while the old VM stays online, by degrading RAID to a single disk.
DA CentOS 7 → Debian 12 on Proxmox Part 1 — NAT pre-stage
Preparing a new VM on an internal bridge with NAT while the old VM continues serving customers, reducing downtime when migrating DirectAdmin from CentOS 7 to Debian 12 on Proxmox.