Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with migration

Help Me Become Well-Read About Lebanon

Fiasco da Gama — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 17:52:38 -0800

I'm interested in Lebanon, (relatively) modern Lebanese history, Lebanese literature, and the Lebanese diaspora. Help me expand a reading list to cure my ignorance about the history of Lebanon; as a nation, as a country with a group of religions, branches and denominations, and as an ethnicity of immigrants spread into North America, Latin America and around the world.

I'm open to reading or watching works of history, film, journalism, literature, documentary, fiction, or any other kind of material. However, though I do recognise that it's impossible to get around, I'm more interested in modern Lebanon *specifically* and less interested in general Middle Eastern history, ancient/classical history of the Mediterranean, or the military history of Israel's wars with its neighbours.

Unfortunately I don't speak or read Arabic at all though I do read Spanish and a bit of French.

How do I come to terms with my boyfriend's refusal to marry me?

Anonymous — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 08:01:54 -0800

So my boyfriend and I had the marriage talk; he said no. I'm having difficulty coming to terms with it. Help! My boyfriend and I are in our early-mid twenties and have been together for about four years, about a year of which has been cohabitating. In a more typical situation, I don't think I would have dreamed of bringing up the possibility of marriage, but there are increasingly pressing (to me) practical reasons why I wish to marry my boyfriend.

Basically, I moved to his country so that we could live together (this was something he very much wanted, and which I was ambivalent about - I didn't like long distance, but I would have preferred not to move). I'm a legal resident here, but not a permanent one, and my visa is not one that ever leads to citizenship. This is problematic for me if I'm to make this country my permanent home - I have a disability that is expensive (at best) and impossible (at worst) to manage properly here until I get permanent residency. There are other reasons I'd like PR - I wish to go back and finish my degree at some point, which is going to be incredibly expensive without it, and the career I had planned to take up upon completion is in the public service - non-PR/citizens are ineligble - but the disability is the primary reason.

As I'm not going to be eligible for skilled migration until I complete my degree (pretty much impossible right now due to astronomical cost), the only option I see is to marry my (citizen) boyfriend. Don't get me wrong - I don't *just* want to marry him for immigration purposes. We had discussed marriage in the past and both agreed that we would probably do it sometime in the future. This was fine until my disability worsened - and now I want to do it sooner, but he has refused.

He says he thinks marrying so I can get PR would make the marriage meaningless. I have difficulty accepting this explanation - he is not someone who attaches a high importance to marriage in the first place, per many previous (less personal) conversations on the topic.

I'm feeling really screwed over right now - I left my entire life for him, and he won't give me what I need in order to build a new one here. I guess it sounds bratty, but that's how I feel. I suggested me moving back to my country, at which he started crying and said he doesn't ever want to be apart from me (and he doesn't cry easily). I'm having difficulty reconciling his claim that he wants to build a life with me with his refusal to help me to do so.

Anyway, sorry for the long rambling background. My question isn't "how do I get my boyfriend to marry me" because I need to respect his decision that it's not what he wants, but "how do I accept this?"

Thanks in advance for your help. I hope my explanation was not too unclear :/

I wanna make you mine

Jon_Evil — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 08:52:51 -0800

I have a hand-me-down iphone, which I'm using (for now) mostly as a music player. However, because I'm not the original user, I can't alter the music library, and I'm getting real tired of my mom's Dan Fogelberg and Gordon Lightfoot albums. How do I make the phone and my itunes realize that I am its owner?

Swapping xbox 360 hard drives...

shmegegge — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 10:42:49 -0800

What is the process like for swapping hard drives in an xbox 360? With the new dashboard update, and its ability to download full retail games to your hard drive, I'm considering upgrading from my 20 gig 360 hard drive. What's the process for migrating all of my data? is it possible to move my gamertag, save files etc... to the new drive? how does one go about doing this?

Automatic MySQL migration

fightorflight — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 08:06:41 -0800

How can I automate the migration of an existing MySQL database to a newer schema? I have two MySQL databases which started out with a common schema, but while one has evolved the other has remained frozen. The changes are all either modifications to a column's datatypes, or the adding or dropping of tables and columns -- no columns are renamed, and it's purely one-way so no merging is required.

I can get the schema for both databases with mysqldump -d, and a diff shows up clearly the changes that need to be made to the first DB. It's just that there are a lot of them, and writing the script to ALTER all the tables by hand will be a chore and error-prone.

Is there some of way of automating this? Ideally some tool that allows me to upload both schemas and spits out a script.

Could a large influx of culturally-similar refugees help save Detroit?

jjjjjjjijjjjjjj — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 08:58:55 -0800

St. Louis, Missouri lost over half its population from 1950-1990. Since the mid-1990s, 80,000 Bosnian immigrants (coming to represent over 20% of the city's population) have established communities that have saved large areas of housing stock from decay. In which other instances have large, permanent groups of non-migrant, non-domestically employed immigrants been settled en masse helping to shore-up a city that is losing population but otherwise has the infrastructure to accommodate more? Has there been any debate or discussion about hypothetical proposals to encourage something similar in Detroit? To clarify: I'm looking for "pull" factors, not "push" factors. (In other words: not "there are a lot of Irish in Boston because of the Irish potato famine".) Not (just) "[specific group]'s needs for X caused them to come here", but "our [individual city]'s desire to stave-off atrophy caused us to incentivize large numbers of [specific group] relocating here." And specifically: examples where a city with waning population is to be rejuvenated, not where a booming city is to be expanded

Additionally, because my curiosity is specifically in its applicability/inapplicability for the problems in Detroit, I'm less interested in things that have brought only certain types of professionals over (Southern Asian medical personnel would be one example of many), or things that've brought populations of people to fill (semi-)rural labor-intensive industries (Latin-American workers in Midwest meat-packing CAFOs, early-20th century Appalachian coal-mining, or Chinese rail workers would be examples).

Have people proposed, discussed, or debated the applicability of encouraging similar things? Where are these proposals or debates?

As always, thanks for your ideas and your expertise. I am not a professional in this field, but I am willing to read challenging things.

Migrated MAPI Permissions?

Leud — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 09:30:02 -0800

Exchange - How does it handle Outlook MAPI permissions when migrating users from one domain to another? So the background is we've got two domains, Domain A and Domain B. Environments are all windows server 2003, Exchange 2003.

Currently users are on Domain A and have mailboxes there, we are migrating users to Domain B, disabling the Domain A account but leaving the mailboxes on Domain A. (This is not going to change for some time).

The accounts are moved over with sIDHistory maintained so NTFS permissions etc all work, the Domain A Mailbox permissions are set with the Domain B accounts as full access and associated external accounts.

My question is how do MAPI permissions work/carry over? If Bob Smith on Domain A has added Joe Bloggs using MAPI permissions to their outlook inbox, will this work once Joe Bloggs has been moved to Domain B?

The MAPI permissions are seperate from AD and I suspect don't check for sidhistory? Looking for confirmation on this.

Thanks,

Drupal migration

Salmonberry — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 11:44:01 -0800

We have a drupal site. Had to move to a new host. Drupal is all gibbled now. I don't know drupal, I have inherited the site maintenance. Any chance someone knows wtf I did wrong? Our old host (Bryght) is shutting down so I got a new host. Bryght gave me a backup and I moved everything over.

Our Bryght site is still up so I wanted to test on our new site which is currently http://www##.ourhost.com/~ourname. The content is there but the CSS is not. It keeps claiming index.php doesn't exist if I try http://www##.ourhost.com/~ourname/drupal, but if I pop in http://www##.ourhost.com/~ourname/index.php it shows up (albeit without CSS or drupal template).

The links keep wanting to go to http://www##.ourhost.com/linkedpage instead of http://www##.ourhost.com/~ourname/linkedpage.

Basically it's finding the tables and the content, but nothing that makes our site look like our site and I can't move from page to page.

What did I do wrong? How can I set this up so it works? I'm out of my league here, I think.

Migrating from Exchange to Google Apps

gttommy — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 06:46:51 -0800

Migrating from Exchange to Google Apps. Initially is it better to forward emails from Apps to Exchange, or the Exchange to Apps (before getting rid of Exchange altogether)? I'm more interested in the reliability of the migration so that users do not experience interruptions and technical issues are minimised. I'm sure performance and security is the same either way.

I've had a look at the following but no luck:
Mefi: Transfer-Gmail-to-Google-Apps-Gmail
Google: guide-for-migrating-to-google-apps

Any other migration tips will be handy, as I read emails and contacts migration to Gmail can be a huge task...

Many thanks MeFi!

What would migrating an Outlook Exchange email system with Google's business Gmail?

gttommy — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:43:43 -0800

What would migrating an Outlook Exchange email system with Google's business Gmail? Google's Gmail for business seems like it has some potential and I am in the process of possibly converting the company!

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/messaging.html

Any advice on what could be involved such as drawbacks or implementation process or method will be useful.

Thanks mefi.

Help!

bda1972 — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 06:56:55 -0800

Need a method to search for, and possible change, long file paths inside documents. My company is ready to take the final step to migrate from Novell to Windows and DFS for our file servers. We have all of the Novell-related stuff completed but are having an issue with some of the documents and spreadsheets we're migrating to the new server.

We have quite a few users that have documents and spreadsheets containing hyperlinks to other documents and spreadsheets on the network. However, instead of linking to S:\document.doc, users have been linking to \\server\share\document.doc. The drive mappings are going to stay the same but the server names will be different so those links will be broken post migration. We have purchased a product that "fixes" these links but it is failing when the path is longer than 255 characters. The company has not been able to correct this yet and our entire migration is on hold because of this one small issue. I realize this is technically the problem of the company whose product we purchased but I'm held responsible for completing this migration, not them.

So, does anyone know of a method to search our documents for long file paths in hyperlinks so we can possible just correct those by hand? Or, if anyone has a method or product they've successfully used in this scenario, please share it here.

It's not a device, it's a folder!

dammitjim — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 21:40:31 -0800

How can I delete a folder in Windows that has a colon in the name? While copying my music library back to my Windows machine (from previously being on Linux), I brought over a folder whose name contains a colon. Windows doesn't allow colons in file or folder names, so I don't know how this happened, but it did.

The problem is that I can't delete it. When I right-click and select delete or drag to the trash, Windows tells me "Cannot delete file: Cannot read from the source file or disk". It thinks I'm trying to specify a device, I think, because of the colon. In the Command Prompt I get the message "The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect."

I can't rename the folder, either, or at least I don't know any other ways to do it than the ways that I've tried. I've tried wildcards in the Command Prompt.

Is there some trick that I don't know here? Or is there a character code that I can substitute or an escape character that I can prepend to the colon character in the Command Prompt? I know how to do this stuff in bash - what about Windows?

Waiting for Migration Assistant

pzarquon — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 17:28:38 -0800

I started migration assistant before I knew how long it would take. Am I screwed? So we finally got the new MacBook Pros in Honolulu, and I took my lunch break to get one. (Yes, after this question, I decided to wait and go new.) Got back to my desk, connected the MBP to my old MacBook via FireWire 400-to-800 cable, and started Migration Assistant.

Except it says it will take 6 hours, and I need to unplug in three, and there ain't no cancel button.

Yes, I know, I should've waited 'til I got home. (Could you? Don't answer that.) Yes, I know, I should've just selected my apps (which is what I most wanted migrated, I could get my giant documents and other folders later). But the button was pushed and now I'm wondering:

1. If I unplug the MacBook and MBP and run on battery, will the Migration Assistant continue? Or is it something that will only function on AC power?

2. If for whatever reason the Migration Assistant dies, does it recover gracefully?

3. How accurate is the time estimate? It actually went up from six hours to six hours and 40 minutes (making me panic even more), then seems to now be dropping faster than realtime. Though I've also read elsewhere that last one percent actually takes a big chunk of time.

I'm confident in Migration Assistant after reading positive comments here. But all the tutorial videos I've found conveniently skip the long wait part of this process!

Australian Migration Agent Needed - good with Creative Industries

divabat — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 01:28:22 -0800

Where can I find an Australian migration agent who's good with the creative industries, or otherwise unusual career paths? I'm finishing my Creative Industries degree (one month then it's over yay!) and am considering getting permanent residency. My main obstacle right now is declaring a Skilled Occupation for the General Skilled Migration visa.

My degree is an Interdisciplinary one, which essentially means it's a hodgepodge of stuff that doesn't necessarily fit neatly into one job title. My submajors are CI (Arts) Management and Creative Writing. My current work placements and past work experience were usually with non-profits and/or young people, so I'd love to claim Youth Worker as my "skilled occupation" - however, the accessing body only looks at your degree, nothing else, and I don't have a Social Work degree.

Most of the skilled occupations on that list don't even apply to my degree; the ones that do don't carry any points. Considering I need 120 points, and the job carries at least 40, this will be an issue. Even if I do opt for the temporary bridging visa (to make up for lack of points), I still need to declare an occupation to work in exclusively for a year.

What I need now is a good migration agent or lawyer that is experienced with dealing with unusual occupational/degree cases like mine. They would be able to look through my course transcript and figure out which high-value skilled occupation I best fit, or find some other way for me to fit in. My dad has a friend who's a migration agent but he proved to be useless. I'm not sure if my uni's Career Service would know much about visas and migration, but it's worth a try. I don't know of too many others that could help. The one person I can think of in a similar situation to mine (originally a German student, now the Marketing officer for the youth arts org I'm interning at) has a sponsored work visa - that's also an option, but that depends on a company willing to sponsor me for a while.

Where can I find such an agent? I'm Brisbane-based but anywhere in Australia is fine. Do you know of any good agents, or resources for agents? Would any artsworker websites be good with this aspect too?

User stats on Exchange 2000?

starscream — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:50:12 -0800

Microsoft Exchange 2000 : is there a built in function or any 3rd party utility that would allow me to export a list of all mailboxes and would include info like User Logon Name and mailbox size? The company I work for was purchased by a megacorp and we'll be migrating all of our users from our Exchange server to theirs. While we have a 150mb limit, they impose a 100mb restriction on mailbox size. There are, of course, 'special' users that have anywhere from 200 to 500mb or more; therefore management is looking for a spreadsheet with basic statistics of our Exchange server users.

I'd love to be able to export some kind of list into csv (or anything else that I could open in Excel and work with) that details usernames, mailbox size/limit, and any other info that might be useful for pre migration planning. If there's any Exchange built-in function or a third party utility that could do this for me, I'd love to know about it!

VS.NET 2003 Migration

GregWithLime — Wed, 14 May 2008 21:50:36 -0800

I am migrating Visual Studio.Net 2003 from and old dev machine to a new one. VS.NET has tons of environmental settings and GUI options that I have modified to my liking. Is there a way to copy those settings from my old dev machine to my new one? Thanks!

A Vista Aversion

bbranden1 — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:08:55 -0800

I'd like to buy a new laptop and to avoid Vista. Further, I have spent years getting the look and feel of my XP computer just the way I want it: properly functioning software, settings just right, internet programs securely locked down, etc. What problems will I encounter if I try to restore a disk image of the current laptop's configuration onto a brand new laptop (first erasing the Vista after making a disk image of Vista's base configuration). For example, what authentication hoops will I have to jump thru to get future Window's XP updates? Might there be any hardware/software incompatibilities? Any licensing issues for non Microsoft software that might be tied to a certain machine? (A dual boot machine is a possibility, I suppose, although that seems complicated.)

Windows Server 2003 Migration to New Hardware

SlyBevel — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 23:45:30 -0800

Help with home media Windows Server 2003 Migration to New Hardware I've been running my home media server for a few years now. Its four storage discs are dynamic discs bundled together in a software RAID 5 array. The four discs together total ~1TB, or ~750GB after RAID overhead.

I've had this server for a few years now, and I'm looking into upgrading. I want to put Server 2k3 on a new machine, and put bigger discs in the machine, and then create a new RAID volume, say, 4TB or so (probably 3TB after RAID overhead). Maybe more.

This is the question: How do I move all of my files, shares, permissions, user accounts, etc. from the old server to the new one?

I want the move to the new server to be completely transparent to my users (meaning myself, friends, family).

I've really loved this server these past few years. It's been rock solid, and I'm looking forward to my next one. But it took me a long time to get it Just. So. I need to put everything back the way it is now on the new server. And I've grown out of 1 measly little TB. Please help!

Stuff that might be relevant:

Current system has four storage drives and one OS drive. Intel board, Intel proc.
New system will be Intel/Intel/WindowsS2k3/at least 4 storage disks/software RAID/real server case this time.
OS is WinServ2k3 Standard with 5 CALs.
I won't go Linux on this, please don't suggest it.

How hard is it for a third country national to work in Austria after going through university there?

joewandy — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 22:42:34 -0800

How hard is it for a third country national to work in Austria after going through university there? I'm a 26-years-old Chinese Indonesian who have been living in Singapore for the past 10 years (since my teen-age). 2 years ago, I completed my (3 yrs) bachelor degree in Computing from the National University of Singapore. I have also obtained my Singaporean permanent residence and been working as a software engineer since then in a local company and another MNC.

With only 1 year+ remaining until the completion of my bond with the Singaporean government (due to them sponsoring my undergrad study), I now have to begin evaluating the possible path I could take for the future.

I'd very much like to move to Europe in order to work and live there. However since this is pretty hard to accomplish for a third country national like me, I thought I could first look into studying in a European country and proceed to find job after graduation. I should be able to save up to US$15k by the time I'm ready to leave, coupled with approximate 3 yrs of experience in the IT field. From my parents I could borrow another US$20k (if necessary) for any other expenses while I'm settling down.

I intend to apply to the University of Vienna due to the special low tuition fee of €15.86 / semester for Indonesian. I'd likely enroll into another related bachelor degree programme (e.g. math, science) as I don't think I am up to the challenge of learning cs stuffs at master's level while having to struggle with communicating in German at the same time.

Assuming that I've got all the study matters taken care of (for the sake of discussion), my questions are:

1. Given my prior experiences and qualifications, how hard would it be for me to find tech job in Austria (or surrounding EU countries) upon graduation? I'm inclined to think that having graduated from a 'local' university, it would be much easier for me to be employed within the country as well, but I might be wrong. Do employers have specific preferences in regards to the nationality of people that they are looking for?

2. How much of a period of time that I would have to look for job upon school completion? Is there any kind of temporary visa that I'd be able to apply for while jobhunting within Austria, or do I have to do it from Singapore?

3. How well are asians accepted and integrated into the European society? Let's assume that I could speak intelligible English and German :)

I might have more questions to follow up later, depending on the responses to this thread. Keep in mind that this is still a medium-to-long term plan, I'm basically just trying to determine where I could go from here onwards.

User Migration between PCs

zephyr_words — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 14:21:20 -0800

What programs\packages are available that allow one to plug a cable into one pc, the other end to another pc, and then migrate the data? I know there are other better ways to do this but I'm specifically looking for a USB cable in-between the two PCs or a regular network cable. Something like this http://www.belkin.com/easytransfercable/advantages/

If you are aware of any regular programs that are very good at user migration (does not have to have the cable requirement) I would love to hear those as well.

XP to XP, Vista to Vista, XP to Vista.

Thanks a lot MeFi!

How can I prevent this bird from migrating to, and damaging my house?

k7lim — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 15:38:02 -0800

How can I prevent a bird from damaging my house? This exact bird (or family of birds) arrives every winter and uses the area under the roof above my window to next. I'm amazed by the stunning accuracy of the on-board navigation system on this crow-like bird, but it keeps ripping grates off my house and tossing insulation out.

Need to transfer lots of data from old internal drives to new external drive.

arnicae — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 00:04:59 -0800

I have two IDE hard drives in my closet, and I need to get the info on them into a new external drive. What's the best way to do this? Upon selling my old Mac G4/400 desktop in 05/2006, I took the hard drives out and put them in static-proof bags. These drives have about 200gb worth of mp3s and 250gb worth of movies on them. My ideal world would involve an external ESATA (SATAII) drive connected to my new MacBook Pro via ExpressCard that would house all of this old info.

To recap: two IDE drives -> one ESATA drive (intended for right now to be a 750gb Seagate FreeAgent) via ExpressCard

Is there any easier way than to find someone with a desktop tower that has spare bays open and the internal hardware available to xfer this data? My other option I guess would be to house the two existing drives in an external fw800 enclosure and xfer the data through my laptop to the new drive.

Are there any better options? Thanks!

Migrate xp from boot camp on one computer to parallels on another?

mandymanwasregistered — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 22:26:50 -0800

How do I migrate a boot camp xp partition on one computer to another computer with parallels installed? Parallels won't let me use the transporter from xp in the boot camp partition--is there a way to migrate my whole xp user environment (programs, settings and files, or at least programs) or do I have to reinstall everything in parallels on the new computer? The only information I can find is on migrating between a partition on a single computer. Help!

I want my email archives please!

batcrazy — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 07:28:45 -0800

Google Apps Filter: How can I get inbox emails from my old email server onto gmail/google apps account? Ok, I switched my company over to google apps this weekend.
(And I love it, btw).

Here's the issue. My company recently changed names/domains. I can use the mail fetcher in the individual user accounts to get archived email from mail.olddomain.com, but I can't get google apps to pick up the mail (even the old inbox mail) from mail.newdomain.com.

As a workaround, I though maybe if I give the newdomain emails an alias, I can get still get them through mail fetcher.
For example, all of our work emails are jdoe@newdomain.com (first initial last name). If I use an alias for the account: johnd@newdomain.com, gmail/google apps is able to 'see' it as a different email address for mail fetcher. The problem is that I've already switched all my MX records over, so while users can still log in to their email accounts to VIEW their archived email, they can't recieve emails on the mail.newdomain.com account (I just tested the accounts and they can send email from the mail.newdomain.com accounts). So, that would mean that google apps can't fetch them, right?

I'm using Google Apps Standard b/c we are a 15 person non-profit and don't have $750 in our tech budget for Google Apps Premiere. One workaround I've seen is the mail migration that is on premiere, but it is IMAP migration and these are all POP accounts. (If there is a way to migrate POP accounts on premiere, would it work if I signed up for the 30 day trial, migrated everything using whatever premier tool or API they have and then cancel my subscription before the month is up?)

As it is now the work week, I can't be messing with the MX records if it will lose/delay emails, but is it possible that I could do something with the MX records to allow the POP archive to migrate to gmail/google apps?

Help me Hive Mind!

(And I did search ask mefi before posting this, but nothing seems to fit this problem).

How can I check if my sites will run in PHP5 ?

Leech — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 08:47:04 -0800

Is there any script or sh command to check all given scripts or files to see if it will be compatible with PHP5? I know that PHP5 has some issues with backwards compatibility, and I need to upgrade my server PHP version from 4 to 5, but I've around 40 sites running (most of them with no big PHP functionality, small contact forms and that).

Is there any script or sh command to check all given scripts or files to see if it will be compatible with PHP5?

I think it couldn't be a big problem to do something like this, specially if it's only based on this reference:
http://ar.php.net/manual/en/migration5.incompatible.php