What it is
This is the planning and reference work behind migrating an enterprise reporting platform from a legacy two-node cluster to a current single-node deployment on modern infrastructure, replacing a longstanding Kerberos-based single sign-on setup with SAML through a cloud identity provider.
Unlike the other projects here, the deliverable is not an application. It is a self-contained reference document covering the architecture, the decisions and their rationale, the component scope, database and service account design, authentication approach, migration sequence, acceptance criteria, and an indexed body of vendor knowledge base articles that answer specific questions encountered along the way.
Why it mattered
Three drivers converged. The existing version was approaching end of support. The newer version replaces the classic interface with a modern one, which is a genuine change-management workstream rather than a silent upgrade. And most pressingly, the existing single sign-on had been failing in ways that resisted a multi-week troubleshooting effort, encryption salt mismatches, service principal name drift, service account identity alignment problems, and credential cache failures that cascaded across the entire cluster rather than staying local to one node.
The decision worth explaining
The most consequential call on this project was to stop fixing the old system.
After extended effort, the root cause of one authentication failure was actually identified, a delegation misconfiguration on the service account. I documented the diagnosis and then deliberately chose not to apply it. The reasoning: the entire authentication mechanism was being replaced in the target version anyway, every hour spent stabilizing the old approach was an hour not spent on the migration, and users could work with manual sign-on in the interim without any loss of function.
Writing down a correct diagnosis and then explicitly declining to act on it is uncomfortable, and it was the right call. The alternative was continuing to invest in a component with a scheduled retirement date.
Working alone against vendor documentation
As the only administrator for this platform, there was no colleague to ask and no internal precedent to follow. The primary source was the vendor’s knowledge base, and the practical output of the project became an indexed set of specific findings, each tied to the article that established it.
Several were genuinely non-obvious. Certain dynamic prompt features are unsupported against direct SQL views and require an intermediate semantic layer. The migration tool’s version must match the target platform rather than the source, which determines which machine it runs from. Value lists are emptied after migration and connection rights are lost, both requiring explicit post-migration steps rather than showing up as errors. A specific runtime configuration block is mandatory on the newer platform, and its absence produces a generic server error rather than anything diagnostic. Special characters in a service password silently break authentication with no error indicating the password is the cause. And the platform’s mail component uses its own certificate trust file rather than the operating system’s store, so a valid server certificate does not substitute for placing the correct root certificate at the configured path on every node.
Each of those is a day lost if discovered during a cutover window rather than during planning.
The result
A complete written plan exists covering architecture, decisions, sequencing, and acceptance criteria, with the vendor research indexed behind it. License procurement, historically the longest-lead item, completed early. The legacy authentication effort is formally closed with the reasoning recorded, so it does not get reopened by someone encountering the same symptoms later.
Where it stands
Planning complete, implementation pending. The most valuable artifact is the reference document itself, since it means the migration does not depend on one person’s memory of eight weeks of vendor research.